Shady's Port-O-Pulpit
gonzo evangelizing the eschaton
Almost Famous!
Feb 1st
My Burning Man article, Fiyo On The Playa, which was published in Magical Blend Magazine back in ‘98 or ‘99, was quoted in a book titled “God in the details: American religion in popular culture” and I just found out via self-Googlating! Check it out!
SEO Etc
Jan 31st
Well, my project of the hour is trying to boost Google Page Ranking by wrapping my head around Search Engine Optimization (SEO). The goal is to understand SEO well enough to be able to move The Shakedown Gallery up the blotter art food chain enough that it will start to generate revenue and make me some money while I’m not out on the highway hitting every parking lot across the country trying to turn the Jamband Scene into my meal ticket.
Part of that pertains to my growing disinterest in most of the music (yes, I do, in fact, really like Furthur even though I think they sound more like a cover band than any other post-Jerry GD project to come along) but, even with that endorsement, I find that I’m increasingly disinterested in the crowd politics at the shows.
So my goal is to have enough of an understanding of linking that online traffic and promotion of art online can start to really subsidize my road income.
We’ll see how that goes.
In the meantime, it’s a hoot to try to learn something new, and the SEO, Google Analytics, Wordpress thing is definitely something new for me to wrap my brain around.
Right now I’m just doing my best with an out-of-the-box Free Wordpress Template (in this case Mystique)… mostly to save money. If I should happen to wind up getting rich, I’ll work on finding someone I can pay to build me a custom template.
Footnote: Here’s my Technorati Blog Claim Code: 6YMSMDSZRBHR
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…)
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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…”
Thoughts While Flying Over The Rockies
Nov 17th
I’m jet-setting across the country again (big pimpin’ with a $130 cross-country direct flight) listening to my iPod & using Virgin Air free in-flight wi-fi to check Gmail, Facebook, etc. T-Rex cranking Electric Warrior… It’s a Brave New World.
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.
Godfather of The Blotterati Makes Headlines Again!
Oct 24th
There’s yet another article on Mark McCloud, my buddy, hero, and curator extraordinaire of the Institute of Illicit Images aka The Blotter Museum. The latest media was handed to me in Golden Gate Park this afternoon — a local free newspaper, The Haight Ashbury Beat, ran an article called A morning with the Godfather of blotter art.
Between the recent Juxtapoz article and this local blurb, Mark McCloud’s been getting quite a bit of press lately!
Blotter Art’s a long way from “going mainstream”, but at least Mark doesn’t have to worry about The Feds kicking in his doors one more time… we hope!
Just in case he needs another robust legal fund, go buy a Giclee of one of his “forensic blotters” from BlotterBarn.com…
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.”