gonzo evangelizing the eschaton
Travels On The Golden Road
More Travels On The Golden Road
Apr 22nd
Last weekend was spent in San Diego at the MAPS “Psychedelic Science in the 21st Century” conference. I had an enjoyable time and was able to pick up a copy of Ralph Metzner and Ram Dass’ new oral history of the Harvard Psychedelic experiences, titled Birth of a Psychedelic Culture: Conversations about Leary, the Harvard Experiments, Millbrook and the Sixties. Ralph Metzner walked by my table at one point and kindly agreed to inscribe the copy to me.
On Monday I was back in the city and working with Alex and Allyson Grey at a Bicycle Day party. I wound up staying there until 5am and had a blast. Saw many friends, heard some decent music, and just felt great about everything.
This week will be a bit of a blur. I’m going to pack up, try to tie up as many loose ends as possible, and point my compass towards New Orleans for the Jazz and Heritage Festival. I haven’t been back there since 2006, the year after Katrina, but I look forward to it.
I am looking to pick up a bit of work with 7 Walkers, but mostly will be flying by the seat of my pants. I look forward to it.
When I get back, it’s full steam ahead for our Furthurmore Prankster Afterparty.
Onward and upward!
Don’t Let The Milk Float Ride Your Mind
Mar 30th
“Don’t let the sun blast your shadow
Don’t let the milk float ride your mind”
– Ziggy Stardust, “Rock & Roll Suicide”
I’ve been increasingly uncertain about the role of this blog and yesterday I wrote a long tirade about how microblogging via Facebook status updates and Twitter have seemingly supplanted a lot of the blogging activity that I used to participate in and how that seems a lot more like microwavable meals on wheels than actual interaction, but by the end of the long winded tirade, I’d bored myself with how tedious it sounded and I didn’t post it.
Then this morning I clicked over to Technorati.com, the site that tracks all of the thousands of blogs online, and saw that it lifted my ranking from 1 to 103 and listed the following tags as descriptive of what this blog is all about: “blotter art, blotter, merry pranksters, ken kesey, lsd, acid, psychedelic art, art, jerry garcia, grateful dead, deadheads, burning man,”
Granted, I probably put those tags in there. In fact, I’m nearly certain I did when I submitted the blog for inclusion on their site, but what I’m noticing this morning is nowhere in there did I include “curmudgeonly rants about how facebook and twitter and microblogging are superficial and deteriorating discourse in the modern world,” so I decided this morning that I need to get over my grumpy old man tendency and get back to the meat of the matter, which is cheerleading this weird little art world that I’ve found myself in and that I’m spending my time trying to promote as an alternative to venturing out into the cold scary world of employment to earn my rent and groceries.
Kesey once used the term The Intrepid Trips Society for Artistic Revolutionary Training (ITSART) as the umbrella under which he threw parties. I’d like to see the ITSART faction of the Grateful Dead scene have a second life. In that vein, I should say it does look like our afterparty is going to happen. At least that still seems to be the hope… Furthurmore is still the working name… Two days, May 31st & June 1st, a continuation of the Memorial weekend event at Mountain Aire…
I’ll post more here and to ATFurthur.com when some contracts get signed and announcements are ready to be made.
And in the meantime, I’m creating some new blotter art designs, tweaking some old ones into new variations, working on scanning images to the Shakedown Gallery website, and still plodding along with Google Page Ranking.
Another Year On The Golden Road
Jan 1st
At the start of every year I seem to find myself quoting the lyrics to a song by a band called The Bottle Rockets that I only ever heard on the radio once… (“Brand new year / Same old trouble / Stroke of midnight / Don’t change a thing”)… Cynical, yeah, but hearing that song growl through the radio just after the stroke of midnight back in Missouri made me howl with laughter and left an indelible mark on my brain.
Thankfully, I had a more momentous New Year event this year, another New Year’s Eve in The Bay with the alumni of the Good Ol’ Grateful Dead. The band’s current incarnation, Furthur, while not really breaking ground (ie Going Furthur in the Acid Test or Merry Prankster sense of the term) is playing some of the best music they’ve played in years, primarily as a result of adding a Jerry Garcia sound-alike, John Kadlecik, who cut his teeth as a Jerry impersonator in the band “Dark Star Orchestra.”
Back in Rosendale we used to make tie-dyes for DSO when they were just getting started. They are a fun band and sound a lot like the early ’70s Grateful Dead. The fact that Bob Weir and Phil Lesh of the ACTUAL Grateful Dead have recruited him to be the lead guitarist of the new band is a testament to just how talented a player he is.
OK, so, yeah, after fourteen years of avoiding having a Jerry clone, it is strange to hear members of The Dead sounding like a cover band of themselves, but, in the great defense of this band Furthur, in a great many ways they sound BETTER than The Dead themselves did during the stadium rock era, primarily because the band is tighter, the playlists are more exciting (no bathroom songs) and they are breaking out old classics that Jerry didn’t play at the end of his career. That said, I’d “trade all my tomorrows for one single yesterday” to hear even Jerry’s off nights, because, yeah, he had that much charisma.
(In that vein, my friends put together a song, “Santa Jerry”, about how, for Christmas, they’d love to hear just one single Jerry tune live, one last time. Audrey, the singer, has a very beautiful voice… check it out on youtube.)
Back in my corner of the world, I’ve got LOTS on my plate… Tonight I have to pull a late-nighter and pack up a bunch of blotter art to send to The Hive Gallery, which is hanging a room of blotter art for a show I’m calling “Microdots: Pixels and Perforations.”
Then in the morning, I’ve gotta shuffle a bunch of things together and then race off to SFO and head to Fort Lauderdale for yet another Jam Cruise… which, after I return, will entail me flying to LA for the Hive show… Phew!!!
And, well, I’ve also started to link up Shakedown Gallery to Facebook and Twitter… with more madness to come…
“It keeps getting stranger and stranger, so let’s get on with the show…”