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…”

Planet Queen
Perchance to dream
She used my head
Like an exploder
The Planet Queen

The worlds the same
I am to blame
She used my head
Like a revolver
The world’s the same

Well it’s all right
Love is what you want
Flying saucer take me away
Give me your daughter

Dragon head
Machine of lead
Cadillac King
Dancer in the midnight
Dragon head

Planet Queen
Perchance to dream
She used my head
Like a revolver
The world’s the same

I move into a big beautiful Victorian next to the Panhandle and then just jump right back to roadrunning. So it goes. For the moment all seems well in my world.

My only real hurdle for the winter seems to be turbo-charging the Blotter Empire. Gotta get the sites up to snuff to supplement $$$ from shows & slinging few prints in Golden Gate Park.

No complaints! Life is good! I’m stoked that I made the leap to Sam Fran’s Disco. Which begs the question “Why am I flying east?”

The heart has it’s reasons, it’s seasons and songs of it’s own. Back to roadrunning, but this time with a spacious room in SF to return to when I decide I’ve had enough of Ghetto Fabulous Wookie Wonderland.

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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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.”

Are my fifteen minutes used up yet?

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.

Or Imbolc. Or whatever…

Happy Mid-Way Point Between The Winter Solstice and the Spring Equinox!

(I mostly just wanted an excuse to re-post that groundhog pic that I just saw on Wonkette, but now that I’ve gone through the trouble of opening up Wordpress, I might as well throw in a gratuitous link to a story about The Secret Order of Abstinence Clowns.)

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