personal musings
Greetings From Rooftopia
Jan 11th
On the eve of my 41st birthday, I find myself in an artists’ compound in Los Angeles affectionately known as Rooftopia. The artists involved are people I met in the fall at the Symbiosis Gathering who had a neighboring booth and became fast friends.
In October, en route to Phish’s Festival 8, I came through town and called up Jimmy Bleyer. He gave me a place to stay and took me on a tour of two gallery spaces, the Hive Gallery and the future site of his Temple of Visions Gallery. We talked and he introduced me to Nathan Cartwright, curator of the Hive Gallery.
Nathan offered me space to hang a small blotter art display at the January 9th opening which coincided with Jimmy’s Grand Opening of the Temple of Visions Gallery.
For my part, my contribution was less than ideal. I squandered valuable planning time in November and barely pulled a display together before I was on a boat in international waters working the Jam Cruise festival. But, hey, thank goodness that the universe looks out for Fools, Drunks and Children, because unseen forces rallied to my aid and a modest but tasty blotter display was hung at the Hive.
The opening itself was nothing less than astounding. There was a line fifteen deep at the doors of both galleries for hours as people paid $15 to attend the two shows. I’d never seen anything like this.
For my part, I was actually in an emotional funk, but these past few weeks — well, from Furthur’s New Year’s Eve run to the present — for me have just been about appreciating how lucky I am to have cultivated such solid friendships in my life.
On New Year’s Eve at Furthur, The Beatles song “All You Need Is Love” blasted from the loudspeakers just as the countdown was happening. Balloons fell from the sky, I was texting this to someone I adore who couldn’t be there and the band started to play The Golden Road To Unlimited Devotion, which is a Grateful Dead devotional song of sorts, and I felt in that (completely sober) moment just how loved and how lucky I am.
Two days later I was on a boat in the ocean, then in Jamaica, then The Caymans and hearing some of the best musicians on earth doing improvisational jams ’til the sun came up, and then flying west for my first ever art display at a “real gallery.” And Love, Love, Love… Without It in The Dream, It’ll Never Come True… Or at least that’s what I’ve been told.
Sooo… 40 has treated me quite alright. Back to Sam Fran’s Disco tomorrow, and back to trying to get a clear sense of what February might have in store.
Regardless, on this eve of my 41st birthday, I feel like one of the luckiest people alive. Now I gotta get out the popcorn popper and drum up some coin ‘cos I ain’t got a trust fund and all this fine livin’ doesn’t come without a price.
“Ohhh, What A Beautiful Buzz, What A Beautiful Buzz…!!!”
(Gimme A Little Drink… And I Fall Down Drunk…)
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.
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!
Facebook 2.0: Mediocre Lifestream Site?
Mar 18th
After a few days of staring at Facebook’s new design and reading streams of remarks like “WTF?!?” interspersed with a barrage of “What Kind of St Paddy’s Day Cabbage Are You?” quiz reults, I’ve tentatively concluded that Facebook is attempting to position themselves as the web’s premiere lifestreaming site. Sadly, if the endless list of gripes about the interface on my page can be taken as representative of the userbase as a whole, they seem to be doing a very poor job at accomplishing this goal.
The lifestreaming trend seems to be an accumulation of the ongoing phases inherent in socializing the internet. The internet as a whole is, of course, entirely social, and the growth, mutation and interactivity of this virtual organism tells the human history of socialized technology. With each new innovation, new interface issues are also raised. Starting with the usenet bulletin board systems, the Internet Relay Chat, then websites and web communities, we eventually arrive at the advent of what we currently lump into the broad category of “social networking” with its various components.
LiveJournal was an early adapter that created a new form of social-blogging. After LiveJournal, “Friend Aggregators” began to emerge around the web, with the vanguard of this revolution seeming to come from Friendster.com. As that site torpedoed into irrelevance, MySpace took over the reins. MySpace excelled as a place to promote music, but not everyone was sold on the “bastard child of Paris Hilton and the American Idol” look of MySpace. My personal favorite of the social sites, tribe.net, shot itself in the foot in January 2006 when an authoritarian new owner came in with radical design changes and seemed to have the agenda of rapidly expanding the site’s userbase from that of a fringe-dweller alternative site to one that could appeal to mall moms, high school students and, well, anyone who fell in some comfortably non-threatening “least common denominator” demographic. Since then, I think the site’s withered into a virtual ghost town. Some people still feel extremely devoted to it, but many have shook their heads in sorrow and moved on… mostly to Facebook.
Facebook has been expanding at an alarming rate. Perhaps the only online site to be expanding faster is Twitter.com. I don’t know the raw data, but these two seem to be the Titans of the new media. And, interestingly, bizarrely even, Facebook seems to be morphing its entire site into a LIfestream that follows and tries to expand upon the Twitter model. At least one person has referred to the redesign as an attempt to create Twitterbook. (A quick Google of the “word” twitterbook yeilds 5,640 entries, including this story, which details the failed efforts of Facebook to acquire Twitter.)
Where is all of this nonsense leading? I have been convinced that FriendFeed.com has its finger on the pulse of the trend. Friend Feed is built on the notion that people might want status updates from one friend, blog entries from another, a photo album from yet another, and strange random date of their own choosing from still another. Where it becomes particularly helpful is when you want to check out the actions of a few close friends but not be bombarded by a bunch of less compelling information from people you know casually.
My only gripe with Friend Feed is that I’ve set up the Twitter feed through Facebook and when FriendFeed updates, it duplicates everything. I know this is something that’s alterable, because I’ve seen other profiles that don’t have this issue, but I haven’t yet devoted more than twenty minutes to beating my head against a wall trying to configure the settings. (I like social media and learning new software, but I’m not super tech savvy. The extent of my familiarity with a site or program typically involves clicking on Preferences or Options and toying around until I feel comfortable or get bored, and then I forget what I’ve done for another six months until something else inspires or annoys me about a site or software that becomes a catalyst for new learning.)
If anyone sets up a Friend Feed account, feel welcome (encouraged) to link to me. The site seems very versatile and may be an early sign pointing in the direction of the future of social networking. In the meantime, if you are trying to make sense of the new Facebook look, I have one very solid suggestion: create Friends lists. I resisted doing so for most of my time on the site. With the roll-out of the new site, it becomes almost crucial to use grouping if you want to know what a core group of friends is saying, doing, linking to and don’t want to be bombarded by a vast assortment of other data that may or may not amuse you at various points, but which certainly makes wading through the endless datastream that Facebook has morphed into.
Oh, and I stand by my earlier suggestion that Facebook could use a little more cowbell.
I’m Amused!
Feb 21st
Got this message today on Facebook:
ha ha i was sort of in a hurry helping the boys clean up the play room. i said please pick up your dudley do right and shady backflash. they said whaaaaaa?! ha ha i meant snidely whiplash. pre-senility!
Snidely Whiplash is the cartoon archvillain to Dudley Do-Right in the Dudley Do-Right of the Mounties segments of The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show.
It’s never occurred to me how similar Shady Backflash is to Snidely Whiplash. Thus far I’ve not tied anyone to any railroad tracks.
MR 40
Jan 12th
Well, here it is… my 40th birthday. I’m congested and holed up in Saugerties at Zig’s place. Just got back from Jam Cruise and am gearing up to head to DC for Obama’s inaugural festivities.
As mentioned a couple days ago, I’ve been reading a few posts, including this one from Michael Ruppert that do not exactly give the cheeriest projection of what’s in store for the world in 2009… Complete Global Economic Arrest?!? For real?!? A simultaneous lateral collapse of all governments? It seems a bit extreme. Very Chicken Little.
The thing is, Ruppert’s never struck me as Chicken Little. Rather, he’s struck me as a brutally honest pragmatist who has seen things that would turn lesser individuals ghostly pale. One of those rare “Speaking Truth To Power” folks who has tasted both Truth AND Power and seems to prefer the former to the latter.
So Chicken Little scenarios aside, I’m in an interesting place in my personal life. I’ve been floating for a few years. Almost two rotations around the sun without a residence. And I’m starting to ponder settling down. I don’t want to settle anywhere this side of the Rockies (I’m in NY right now) and would really rather not settle anywhere West of, say, Oakland…
I am also retooling this website, blotterati.com, and trying to get it to flow seamlessly with shakedowngallery.com and popeshady.com… It should take a bit of effort.
Oh, and I think I’m going to make a concerted effort to start typing with Capital Letters at the beginning of sentences again… mostly just to get in the habit of capitalizing after periods. The lovely miss rembert got me writing in lower-case letters more than fifteen years ago and I haven’t gotten out of that habit. It’s fun, but at some point I slip into it when I realize I maybe ought to be writing a bit more formally. Or I’ll switch back and forth arbitrarily from Capitalizing to not capitalizing… and that just gets distracting, for myself as much as anyone else…
So… 40 fuckin’ rotations around the sun and what next? I don’t know. I joked about having a 40th birthday party called MR 40, along the lines of the AT 40 event in Vegas a few years back… And, instead, I’ll post a blog called MR 40 and call it a day.
In the words of Jim Morrison, “Proud to be part of this number!”
global economic implosion on board for ‘09?
Jan 11th
well, i’m back in new york after a fun new years run that started with a jaunt to st louis for dad’s wedding, went to san francisco for new year’s eve, and ended with a vending marathon working the merch booth on the jam cruise…
and now that i’m back in new york? i’m reading about peak oil and the economic meltdown and all of the madness that may be in store when obama takes office in a little more than a week…
much of it is fueled by my interest in the writings of michael ruppert… his reading of the tea leaves is more than a little troubling.
back in the woodstock nation
Dec 18th
well, here it is, near the end of 2008 and i’m gearing up for christmas in st louis, dad and jackie’s wedding, new year’s eve in sf with the grateful dead alumni (hopefully!), jam cruise, my 40th birthday, the end of george w. bush’s presidency, and the beginning of obama’s… and, of course, a completely reinvented web presence.
hmmm… time… where does the time go?
i can’t help but think of both who i am and who i thought i was or thought i wanted to be… 40 rotations around the sun, no shit!?!