gonzo evangelizing the eschaton
shadygrove
I write, travel, sell artwork in the post-Grateful Dead counterculture. Burning Man (Black Rock City) is the place on the planet where I feel I can most truly express myself. My community is extensive and weird. I like nice people... "strangers stopping strangers just to shake their hands." My home page is http://popeshady.com. My online store is http://shakedowngallery.com and my Facebook page is http://www.facebook.com/popeshady. My profile on tribe can be viewed at http://people.tribe.net/shadygrove. My passions in life are simple -- good friends, good music, food, drink, dancing, art and removing the malignant influences of the neo-con psychos from the landscape of America. I like mysticism and weird religions and am wary of fundamentalism of all varieties. My church is the Born Again Pagan, Christian Mystic, Zen Gypsy Warlock, Psychedelic Mind-Fucked Church. The Church is omni-directional, poly-denominational, for prophet and likes gurus too.
Homepage: http://shakedowngallery.com
Posts by shadygrove
Pad, Sweet Pad
Oct 18th
Well, just got back to San Francisco, after a week back east at the New York Harvest Festival, and lucked into what seems to be a great living situation near the Panhandle with a couple of older guys that I know via their friendship with the curator of the Institute of Illicit Images.
One of the guys that I’ll be living with had a moment of his “fifteen minutes of fame” when he put flowers in the barrels of guns during a Viet Nam War protest back in the sixties.
The house is a sprawling beautiful Victorian, the sort that made the Haight-Ashbury the hot spot that it was during the mid-to-late Sixties.
I visited The Haight on my first trip to San Francisco in 1987, the 20th anniversary of the Summer of Love. While in town, I bought Charles Perry’s Haight-Ashbury: A History. That book (once again out of print!) sits alongside Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test as being, to me, one of two books that best captures the What and Why of San Francisco’s late ’60s art explosion.
Paul Krassner summed up the Haight as a “spiritual revolution that was treated as a temporary fad.” And I think he was pretty spot on in that assessment.
Despite its storied history, I had never thought of wanting to live in or near The Haight. The neighborhood goes through roller-coasters of popularity, but it is also a sad landmark in many respects. Any given block of the upper Haight is heavily populated by drifters begging for change. Many are rude.
So much of the Burning Man “No Spectators” ethos owes more than a passing debt of gratitude to the interactive street theater that groups like the Diggers and the San Francisco MIme Troupe enacted in the Haight. So much of that early “Trip Without A Ticket” art has infiltrated the Burner scene, but you’d be hard-pressed to know this walking down Haight street.
The Upper Haight is both gentrified and ghettoized, at the same time. The street is populated with nice inviting store fronts selling love beads, tie-dyes, incense, bongs and peasant dresses, same as it has for years, and out front there are dozens of dreadlocked young people with dogs asking for change or to “spare-a-juana”…
The Charles Perry Haight-Ashbury book details the promise of the neighborhood as an art movement. The dull pendulum swing from Psychedelic Mall to Beggar Colony only underscores, in my mind, just how tragic the loss of the neighborhood’s artistic spirit really is.
Then again, that same spirit is alive and well elsewhere in San Francisco, a fact that I’m reminded of every time I venture past Gerlach, Nevada out into the Black Rock Desert for the annual designer drug desert orgy.
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Looking for FEMA Trailers
Sep 30th
The theme for next year’s Burning Man is “Metropolis” so I’m thinking it would be great to create “FEMA Trailer Park Camp: The City of the Future.”
But, first things first, I need a bunch of FEMA Trailers. Do they ever turn up at government auctions? Can frustrated New Orleans residents just list ‘em on craigslist and take the money and run?
Symbiotic Synesthesia
Sep 19th
Symbiosis Notes (written on site with no Internet connection.)
After the burn, there’s no better place to decompress than Symbiosis. I first came here in ‘07, hitchhiking from Earthdance, and had the time of my life.
This year I was offered the opportunity to vend the event as part of an agreement to sell merchandise for Alex Grey / Chapel of Sacred Mirrors. I knew going in that this would be both a great opportunity and a bit sad. Unlike last time, I couldn’t run around without a care in the world. I’d have to stay present and aware of the needs of the booth. On the flip side, I’d have the chance to strengthen ties with CoSM & also off-set the annual hole in my wallet left in the wake of The Burning Money Festival.
I had purchased a 20×10 car-port for BM with the purpose of using it for Symbiosis & any left-coast vends that I might be able to put together. After an all night trek into Yosemite, Sefirah & I hit the forest & slept just as the sun was coming up.
By mid-day Wednesday, we were able to scope out the land and were given what appeared to be a choice spot to set up our 20×10.
The week went well, but Symbiosis is primarily an art scene and a burner scene, not an orgy of consumerism, so sales fell far short of an avalanche of cash. That said, we had no trouble closing the booth when sales tapered and running off to see music ’til the wee hours.
And I made some exceptional new friends!
Perhaps my favorite new people are our neighbors, Adam Scott Miller and Amanda Sage. On the first day I overheard Amanda discussing the work of Ernst Fuchs with someone. I’d been introduced to Fuchs’ work by Phil Jacobson, my good buddy, spiritual advisor & one-time work study employer at Naropa.
Not only did Amanda know Phil well, she’d seen him rather recently. She and I shared laughs throughout the weekend, conjuring up images of bears sneaking on site wearing Symbiosis wristbands & ultimately being discouraged by the loud electronica. Bears, we decided, prefer bluegrass and would rather prey upon patrons of string summits.
– well, those are the notes I wrote at Symbiosis. I’m now riding with Sefirah to Earthdance. I can only pray it’ll be as joyous and beautiful as last weekend. Regardless, I feel so fortunate for this extended stay in the Pacific Northwest love bubble!
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Rebooting The Blog
Sep 15th
Mon 9/14/09
Another Burning Man has come and gone. Black Rock City has congealed into something of a holding pattern. This has its trade-offs. Rather than just emphasize the bits that I’m most critical of (same ol’ over-hyped club-hopping scene) I found ways to enjoy myself and had a relatively good, fun, if not entirely “remarkable” year on the playa.
The Pope Shady riff seems like it’s finally found a nice, comfortable groove. On Sunday I did a very scaled down version of Pope Shady’s Gonzo Evangelical Nacho Communion. It lacked the Pomp and Circumstance that accompanied having the same ritual in the Connexus Cathedral, but I slowly found ways to integrate years of Pope Shadyisms… Fundalini Energy Raising merged with Discordian and Subgenius gibberish, and, all in all, I found a loose, subtle, comfortable way to entertain myself and others with Sangaria and Cheez Wow (the generic brand Cheez Wiz.) And what, pray tell, is Nacho Communion if not the purposeful merging of Spirituality and Cheese In An Aerosol Can?
So now I’m back in San Francisco at The Institute of Illicit Images (sometimes also called The Institute of Illegal Images)… I leave tomorrow for the Symbiosis Gathering in Yosemite and will be representing the art of Alex Grey alongside the blotter art and various ephemera from The Institute…
Symbiosis was my favorite music festival in 2007, but I didn’t work it that time, just ran around with a small group of friends having the time of my life. It felt like a small-scale Burning Man event without all the Big Art and Over-The-Top craziness that makes Burning Man the inter-dimensional fire circle.
The past week in SF, I have been doing my typical post-Burn review of Things Going On In My Life and, just now, walking back from a book store on Valencia (where I purchased Generation Hex, a smallish compendium of little known authors on the subject of Chaos Magic and Occultism) I began to think, once again, about my long-neglected blog. Over the years, my efforts at blogging have been spotty at best. I got interested in blogging via Alobar Greywalker, a fellow New Orleans Tarot reader, who introduced me to Live Journal. I was somewhat active on Live Journal for a spell. Then I discovered tribe.net and all of my blogging rapidly shifted to maintaining an active blog on that site. By January 2006, tribe.net had fairly successfully shot itself in the foot. I posted a few more times to the tribe.net blog, but, one by one, everyone that used to maintain lively dialogue with me via tribe.net fled the site or checked in with it so infrequently that keeping a blog on the site started to feel like yelling down into a well…
As I was walking back from the Modern Times book store, I started thinking about my blog and how it would be nice to just post to it, sporadically, via my phone and see if I could rekindle some thread of the sense of “dialogue” that I got from keeping a blog on LiveJournal and tribe.net… Blog as solitary event is a pretty lonely planet, but blog linked via Facebook might be able to gain a little bit of traction… So, the new scheme, to make little posts from time to time, something more weighty than the non-event of microblogging via Twitter and Crackbook status updates, but something less than feeling I need a whole magnum opus before making the effort to post… in other words, an online venue that I can quickly and conveniently post to via my iPhone in whatever capacity I deem worthy.
Over this past weekend I was consigned a handful of beautiful signed psychedelic art prints. I am planning to bring them to Symbiosis to sell. An obvious function for the blog could include posting pics taken by my phone of these new items, alongside brief descriptions of the items themselves. If one of these items sells, it can help pay for the annual expense of maintaining the server and blog. If more than one sells, I can start to pretend like I’m doing “online commerce”… : )
Because it’s my blog and I don’t need to have it make any sense, I can alternate at my whim from political posts to art posts, to musings on things I’m reading (I have a few tirades on this new book, “Generation Hex”, already worked up in my head), to simple bursts that say where I’ll be in the upcoming weekend. Or what I thought of my previous weekend. And maybe from time to time, I’ll actually write something with some degree of “substance”…
In any event, my hope is that by having the blog feed directly to my Facebook “Feed” that someone might read it from time to time and it won’t retain the “Little Timmy Yelling Down A Well” feeling that posting to tribe.net has garnered in recent years… If you’ve gotten this far into the blog post, I’d appreciate a one sentence holler to let me know someone’s bothering to read this.
And if no one replies, well, I can always revise the old Alien tagline, “In space, no one can hear you scream”, to “In cyberspace, no one can hear you blog.”
Another Pic From A.T. Furthur: Daze Between
Jun 3rd
Vince DiBiase just told me over the phone that there is a picture of mice elf and Zane with Alex and Allyson Grey posted on the CoSM blog alongside pictures of himself and his wife Gloria with Alex and Allyson. The post, which includes a couple other snapshots from A.T. Futhur: Daze Between is posted here.
Are my fifteen minutes used up yet?
City Lights Book Store (As Seen From The Window Of The Furthur Bus)
May 25th
Here are a couple photos from our tour of S.F. with Dave at the wheel and Dr. Are We Really? providing a narration of local landmarks.
Thoughts on A.T. Furthur: Daze Between
May 25th
(composite video by Dr. Are We Really?)
In 2005, Zane Kesey planted the seed in my head for A.T. 40, a party to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Merry Pranksters’ Acid Tests. My objective in that case was to see how close to “Burning Man in a night club” (minus the dust storms, sunburns and open flamethrower tryouts) we could actually get on Halloween Night in Vegas. What my partners and I created was an eclectic monstrosity that to this day many people (including no less a person than Zane) tell me was the best party of their lives. We all threw everything we had at that event, but behind the scenes it was a drama-ridden, gut wrenching experience that ended with “Smilin’ Bob” Robertson, a scalliwag out of North Carolina who used to put together a festival called SmileFest, absconding with whatever profit there was and as much of the investment capital as he could squirrel away.
OK, so fast forward to 2009. The Dead is hosting two days at the Shoreline Ampitheater in Mountain View and Zane Kesey calls me and says he has been getting calls about people asking if there’ll be another Acid Test. I view this as a green light to step in and work on the party rather than see it go the “Grateful Dead cover band / hippie nostalgia party” route. Acid Tests, after all, should be about pushing the creative envelope. No, forget that. Acid Tests should be about shredding the creative envelope and leaving strips of creative ribbon strewn about the floor in so much afterglow confetti.
I’d had this idea after A.T. 40 that I’d been calling “A.T. Furthur: The Always Traveling Furthur Circus”, the illegitimate psychedelic godchild of P.T. Barnum and Black Rock City. So I start scheming with some friends. We make a wish-list. Live painting by Alex and Allyson Grey. Beats Antique. A San Francisco All-Star Band. Stilt Walkers. Cabaret. Off-kilter Vaudeville.
PuTzu, a gem and mineral merchant in Northern California whom I know from the Grateful Dead scene agrees to finance and collaborate on the party.
I hear about Steve Kimock’s new project, Crazy Engine, with Kimock and Jerry Garcia Band Hammond B3 master Melvin Seals. That seems like the perfect band!
While Crazy Engine was not, technically, available, Matt Butler of the Everyone Orchestra got involved and put together a band that was above and beyond the call of duty… an all star band with members of ALO, Hot Buttered Rum, Kimock, Seals, and a host of others.
Matt used to be in a band called Jambay that performed at Ken Kesey’s Twister! parties, so he gets the “throw things at the wall and see what sticks” Prankster aesthetic. Ken’s favorite part of the Acid Tests was that the Grateful Dead would “not just play the notes on the page, they would play to the moment.” Jambay had that and Matt Butler’s Everyone Orchestra has been able to master the Prankster aesthetic and take it to another level. EO is all about playing to the energy in the room.
Finding a venue for this party was no easy feat, though. I’d suggested Space550 at 550 Barneveld. I’d been to a Burning Man style party there… “The Mad Hatter’s Ball”… and thought it would make a great venue. But to fit EO the stage would have to be expanded, encroaching on already limited dance space and the logistics of an indoor-outdoor event were never fully agreed upon.
A venue in Richmond, over in the East Bay, was located. But it was big and would have taken a 2500 person show to begin to seem full, much less financially start looking like a break-even.
In the end, we were delivered a great venue on the water in SF, Kelly’s Mission Rock.
The party’s biggest drawback, in my mind, was that we didn’t have a good decor team properly lined up. We had a loose commitment that a decor team would come in and we budgeted for it, but I guess that decor team had gone all-out at the HowWeird Street Fair the previous weekend and didn’t want to do our party the following Tuesday. We then tried to throw something together last second on our own, but the venue was strict about only allowing “fire retardant fabric”… We couldn’t find that, last second and at an affordable price. So decor fell short.
We also didn’t have much of a production team put together. OK, let me rephrase that. We didn’t have a production team. Production was held together by spit and bubble gum and good intentions. And yet… the evening flowed. Pu’s stage manager, Steve, worked miracles. My buddy Billy Jack jumped through hoops for the event. Mike, my former housemate from my brief stint in Georgia, showed up to have a good time and was drafted into what must have seemed like an endless ordeal of “volunteerism”.
Live music upstairs. Electronic & Live music downstairs. Alex Grey did live painting to the sounds of Everyone Orchestra. Beats Antique mixed turntables with instrumentation and performance elements by belly dancer extraordinaire Zoe Jakes. The Jug Dealers and L’Fiasco. And DJs from our NY family, Haj and Rhythmystic.
By sunrise, the Lost Creek Gang, Ken Babbs’ son Eli and his “brother from another mother” Ocean were on stage making music. Ocean delivered perhaps the best line on this moment. Someone came up to him and said he did a good imitation of a guy too high to play who walks up to an instrument, stares at it, walks away, then comes back and plays. His reply? “I’m from Portland. We’re big on irony up there.”
Other memorable moments from this trip were delivered courtesy of Dr. Are We Really?, senior anthropologist of the Mind Shaft Society. (The Mind Shaft Society promises “Give us your mind and we give you the shaft.” And they deliver on this promise.) On the Monday leading up to the Test, Dr Really? gave a guided tour of San Francisco with the Merry Prankster bus Furthur (or “Furthur On” as some have dubbed it, the child of the original Furthur.) Dr. Really’s tour took us to the North Beach, the Haight and around SF. We landed at one point at K-FOG where The Dead were doing an in-studio performance. We flyered the studio. Zane flyered Phil Lesh. We let it be known that the Prankster spirit was alive and well.
After Shoreline, en route to the Gorge, we came upon a brokedown school bus on the side of the road. Furthur! Didn’t you just get a new engine? Billy Jack jumped out, ready to help. Alas, the problem was bigger than a quick roadside repair.
I hear it’s back in Pleasant Hill in the bus barn again. Bus Randy put it best, “Next time, lets sacrifice an engine to the Bus Gods before the road trip!”
No New Tale To Tell?
Apr 21st
Well, this definitely feels like the least inspired I’ve felt on a tour with a band that consisted of members of the Grateful Dead alumni. I can’t say “I’m over it,” because just last year I had a great experience with a five night stand of Phil Lesh at the closing of the Warfield, one of my favorite venues to see the Jerry Garcia Band “back in the day”…
I’m just not feeling this music and it’s taking considerable effort to even convince myself that I should bother to find a ticket or go into the shows. The first three nights of the tour, I went into the venue. The past two nights, I’ve chosen to stay outside. The second night in Worcester, MA, I had one of the best experiences I’ve had on this tour just staying on Shakedown talking with an artist friend, Richard Biffle.
I think the bulk of my dissatisfaction gets unfairly lumped at Warren Haynes’ feet. I think Warren is probably a tremendous individual and I have nothing but respect for the guy. But I don’t like hearing him fronting the Grateful Dead. It doesn’t work for me. I read a review today that claimed he sounded like a bar balladeer and that pretty much sums up how I feel. He takes one of my all-time favorite songbooks, the Robert Hunter lyrics that were written for Jerry Garcia to perform, and makes them sound like a mediocre blues bar band. They are incredible musicians, so, of course, they’d dust any blues bar band on earth, but the sound still has that generic bar blues flavor to it. I’m not feeling it and I don’t care if I get into another show on the tour or just stay outside and vend.
At this juncture i wonder what surprises the Core Four have to offer. I want them to take chances. I want them to jump off musical cliffs and to chart terra incognito. But they did that for thirty plus years and if there is no more pioneering in them, at least they don’t sound like a “where are they now” band. I do feel like they need to mix it up or give it a rest, though, because the current formula just feels way too predictable. These are not guys that any of us want to see being booked the same way as, say, “Molly Hatchet live at the Chenango County Fair” along with the truck and tractor pull, but that’s sort of how this current line-up makes me feel.
So that leaves The Parking Lot… essentially one of the most tore-up nitrous tank strewn messes I’ve ever seen. These tours are played out. Strangely, I think Phish Tour will feel more upbeat and inspired because at least the preppy snotnoses who come out to see those shows are going to be full of vitality.
On the plus side, I have a lot of cool art that I’ve been displaying and I’ve gotten a tremendous amount of good, positive feedback from that. So I don’t feel like my life out there lacks purpose or direction. I’ve made some money and had some fun and seen some friends, I’ve just disassociated from any sense of feeling like I’m on anything that I could reasonably consider a “Grateful Dead Tour” experience. It’s not. Not by a long stretch.
I’m glad I found Burning Man when I did so that I don’t feel like one of those grumpy old men who felt that everything cool happened in the past and that all of the wells of inspiration on earth have run dry. I know better. And I know that good things can come of even tore up ghetto wookie lot scenes… As the bard once said, “Every once in a while you can get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right.” It’s plenty strange and I’m looking hard, just not seeing much more than a glimmer through the cracks in the foundation.
This Is Your Life
Apr 10th
I travel a lot and have pretty much ever since I caught the Grateful Dead bug back in high school. Twenty plus yeares of roaming the Golden Road has afforded me the opportunity to see most of the states in the U.S. and a couple other opportunities have gotten me off of U.S. soil for short stints as well.
One thing I’ve always enjoyed is hearing about places or people and then going to that region and seeing those places and meeting those friends of friends and watching the interwoven circles of friends ripple outwards. Big parties like Dead concerts and Burning Man facilitated those sort of ripples in big ways.
Case in point: the past couple of days I’ve had the good fortune after working an Omega Institute conference in NYC to visit friends who work the Gathering of the Vibes festival in Connecticut.
Yeaterday I checked my location and noticed it was “Newtown, Connecticut” and a memory from fourth grade was triggered… when a cute girl across the street that I’d developed a crush on moved out of town. She gave me her adress… Taunton Lane, Newtown, Connecticut. In school-boy-crush-like manner, I committed the address to memory.
This morning my friend took the scenic route. As we were going down this beautiful back street I glanced at the street sign — Tauntin Lane — and a wave if strange distant memories whispered in my ear.
Life is such a trip!
The Money Masters
Mar 30th
Last night and this morning, I watched a two part documentary posted to Google Video titled The Money Masters.
Here’s Part One:
and here’s Part Two:
Due to somewhat choppy editing, there is about five minutes of repetition at the beginning of Part Two.
In the documentary the narrator chronicles a history of money and banking, focusing in great depth on the “fractional reserve system” that is at the root of the Federal Reserve System.
The video gives a great deal of background history to the system and how it was organized and orchestrated through various political machinations to pass through the United States legal system. Towards the end, it also offers a handful of “solutions”, most of which revolve around abolishing the Federal Reserve System and creating a new debt-free American Note in the place of the Federal Reserve Notes currently circulated.
After viewing the video I sent the following email to the email address listed on the documentary makers’ website:
i have known about “the federal reserve scam” for about fifteen years, but the money masters video laid out a very clear and comprehensive history of money and the monetary systems employed around the world.
only one thing raised my eyebrows and caused me to question if there might be an ulterior motive behind the video. towards the end, the video made frequent references to solutions proposed by milton friedman. my understanding of friedman’s version of laissez-faire capitalism often resulted in statist authoritarianism, corporatism and even fascism. while this could be evidence of a broken watch being right twice a day, it did cause me to question some of the other conclusions that the video reached. i do not believe that the implementation of chicago school economics by the “new democrats” and the “neo-conservatives” have offered anything other than more debt, more war, more poverty and fewer constitutional protections.
i do realize that this runs much, much, much deeper than democrat vs republican or liberal vs conservative, but i remain skeptical that the solution lies in the free-market (corporate) libertarianism forwarded by milton friedman. again, i am willing to admit i do not know everything about friedman, but i have certainly not been a fan of reagan and even less a fan of the eight year reign of error that is called the second bush admistration.
Even with that caveat, I still recommend the video as an interesting history of money and banking in the United States. The current “banking crisis” is not some strange aberration from an otherwise stable system. It is another crank of a wheel.