Halloween is coming

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An art motorcycle created by Bangkok artist Roongrojna Sangwongprisam. Boy, would I love to power this baby down Powell Street to Market and watch the tourists scatter for shelter.

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Summer 101

Henri Matisse: Bonheur

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Summer 102

Ludwig von Hoffman (1861-1945):  Adam in paradisical landscape, detail.

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The vanilla bean pod story

I went to the Whole Foods at California and Franklin on Saturday in quest of a vanilla bean pod. Not knowing where to begin, I inquired of three store employees where such an item might be located. Three times I had to explain what a vanilla bean pod is, since none of the workers had a clue. Upon reflection, it occurred to me that although everyone is familiar with the flavor, no one seems to be aware of its botanical origin.

I loaded some other stuff and headed for the cashier, a young woman to whom I explained my problem. Success: she knew exactly what I required, disappeared for three or four minutes and eventually returned with a little glass jar containing a single vanilla bean pod doubled over inside it.

At $9.99 it was a total rip-off, and I've meanwhile learned you can buy the bean pods en masse for a couple bucks on eBay, but at least I went home happy.

Why was I looking for a vanilla bean pod? Because I'm making my own ice cream and have been advised that beans taste better than extract (which can be made cheaply by soaking the beans in vodka).

How did I get started making ice cream? I was standing in line recently at the Safeway complaining vigorously to an older African American lady behind me about how packaged ice cream is full of candy for kids and you can't get the real stuff any more, etc, etc. She said, listen, if you want good ice cream, the only solution is to make it yourself.

Something clicked in the back of my head. I bought a Cuisinart ice-cream maker at Amazon.com for $40 and was soon on the path to perfect ice-cream. I will never return to the pathetic commercial junk again. Substituting Splenda for sugar, I have with patience created the perfect vanilla, to go on top of the currently fresh organic California strawberries. Soon I will master the perfect chocolate. In July, when the black cherries are in, I will commence production of my favorite flavor, Cherry Garcia. In the fall I shall move on to beer ice cream (add Guinness Stout in place of milk), and the next holiday season will find me luxuriating in exceptionally  high-proof home-made rum raisin. With golden raisins and first-rate booze.



THE EMPEROR OF ICE-CREAM


Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem*
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.


from Wallace Stevens, The Emperor of Ice Cream, 1922.


* Let appearances become reality

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A new and deified existence

She touched his organ, and from that bright epoch even it, the old companion of his happiest hours, incapable as he had thought of elevation, began a new and deified existence.

An evidently unintended double entendre in Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit, chapter 24.

Thanks http://laudatortemporisacti.blogspot.com/.

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Proposal for an Annual Fog-Burying Ceremony

Gustaf Sobin writes of the discovery of numerous stone tablets bearing the inscription “Buried lightning” (Fulgur conditum) on the plateaus above rural Provence. They were placed on the location where a lightning bolt had struck: the lightning was then ritually buried along with whatever charred pieces of wood or rooftops or horsecarts were lying around.

Citing Lucian and Plutarch, Sobin says that a wall was erected around the place where the lightning fell, then an animal was sacrificed and a priest would consecrate the enclosed ground. Considered sacred, the lightning bolt was memorialized and ritually "housed" as the signature of Iupiter Fulgator, and any further destructive powers were assumed to be rendered harmless thereby.

I wonder if it wouldn’t be a good idea to conduct an annual fog-burying ceremony here in San Francisco. I suggest we convene at the top of the Buena Vista Park annually in August (a good time of year for it, when folks have given up hope of ever seeing the sun shine again) and conduct a ritual interment, somewhat along the lines of placing a quantity of San Francisco fog in a lead casket along with a tube of suncream oil to counteract its noxious effects, and then burying the casket several feet underground.

After some prayers of deliverance and a short sermon by an especially appointed Fog Bishop, the rites might be concluded with a sacred bonfire, during the course of which the congregation would be urged to get naked and dance around with broomsticks up their asses and indulge in whatever other festive activities might be considered appropriate or not, as the case may be.

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Photo from Gustaf Sobin, Luminous Debris. 
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

Ivan Sohrakoff’s California photographs

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For those of us too long in the city pent, there is always Ivan Sohrakoff’s photostream of excellent California pictures at http://www.flickr.com/photos/5tons/tags/california/.

Be sure to click on the Slideshow icon in the upper right.

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Plainfeather's Blog Is One Year Old

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Plainfeather's Blog is one year old today, during which time it has greeted a total of 4,335 different visitors, 1,930 of whom came back for more. There have been altogether 7,323 hits, the biggest one-day record being 382.
I am very grateful for all of this, so I want to reward everyone by repeating the post which is my personal  favorite for the past year.




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Congratulations

to our brave U.S. soccer team, and especially to our fabulous goalie Tim Howard. It's true we may have tied the wicked English only because they were having a bad football day, but hey, you guys did great and who says that luck isn't a legitimate part of sports competition. Now on to Germany vs. Australia (today at 11am on Channel 7) -- Schieb mir den Fußball, Ottfried.

Of course we were delighted also to learn that Joe Biden attended the game yesterday with "several family members" (Reuters). Nice to hear that politics has been so good to you, Joe, although I frankly doubt that you had any more fun than I did in front of my 24" Viewsonic. I wish you could have found time to answer my open letter from last weekend, though, which I now fear has fallen upon deaf ears.

A Deep-damasked Tiger Moth

I was looking at yesterday's post about John Keats' casement and I realized I didn't know what a Tiger Moth looks like, so I went searching on the Internet. The species has international variants, but I think this is the British model:

Things Which Boston Has That San Francisco Doesn't

1.   Dunkin' Donuts,* ubiquitously.
2.   Durgin Park Restaurant.
3.   Windows with small rectangular panes of glass embedded within them.
4.   Red-brick buildings.
5.   Elm trees (Ulmus Americanus), of which there are very few left on Boston Common.
6.   Tons of college students.
7.   Charles River.
8.   Boston Public Library.
9.   Symphony Hall.
10. Jordan Hall.

*   Dunkin's Donuts are of course named after St. Dunkin of Duffnott, a corpulent Irish monk of the early tenth century who discovered that by placing a hole in the center of a pile of honey oat cakes, they could be neatly stacked. St. Dunkin is remembered also for a highly sophisticated argument for the existence of God which states that if fresh donuts and coffee exist, how could God not exist?

Maui

A friend from schooldays returned recently with his wife from a couple weeks in Maui, which started off a series of reflections upon my own visit there in 1971.

Compared with today the island was still relatively undeveloped for tourism. Surfers from L.A. converged upon Lahaina annually, and returned with stories of an undeveloped beach area near Makena, a huge tract of land owned by the Matson Navigation Corporation. 

Word got around, and soon there were a couple hundred California hippies camped on Black Sands Beach. We lived naked and slept under the stars, boiled our brown rice and green tea over campfires on the beach, enjoyed the fruit which fell down from the trees, and took turns fetching fresh water from a well on the Makena Road. We scorned alcohol as stupid-making, took psychedelics instead, snorkeled, meditated, exchanged life-stories with complete strangers at the evening campfire.

It proved one of the most educational experiences of my life, worth at least two years of grad school, with no tuition costs. I learned that white people turn brown as a berry when left out in the sun all day. I learned that sexual attraction is not such a big issue when nobody has any clothes on. I learned that people will almost automatically form tribes and live communally by instinct, if left to their own devices. And I learned that inwardly it feels completely right to go to bed an hour after the sun goes down and rise with the sun in the morning, and that you learn to avoid buried kiawe thorns subconsciously when you run around barefoot at the edge of the beach. 

My two months on Maui were probably the best of my life, amplified in my imagination no doubt by the infallible judgment of the righteously ripped. It was a holy space, and I decided to protect it by never going back. I wrote this journal-poem when I returned to San Francisco:

Maui 

Vagrant heaps of clouds stood piled

at the rim of the volcano. Like a tribe

of natives we lived naked on the island.

I hunted cowrie shells in pulsing tidal

pools and watched whales playing

in the channel. I got sick with dysentery

and lay two days half-dead in a kiawe grove.

Once a large black bomb washed up

onto our beach. A Navy helicopter landed

on our beach one morning, scooped away

the bomb, and flew off with it into the sky.

One afternoon I watched a mongoose

steal a loaf of bread from my camp. 

On the road to Ulupalakua I dropped acid

and tasted my own seed. Evenings we sat

at the ocean's edge, chanting OM

to the setting sun. We slept under

myriad shining stars of the universe.

Once I awoke before dawn and saw

a comet, a pale blaze in the eastern

sky, vast as a galaxy.

 

Pearls over Shanghai

For my birthday last weekend I got taken to the current production of Pearls over Shanghai at the Hypnodrome. Fearing initially that attending a Cockettes revival might exhaust my final reserves of bathos [my God, has it come to this?] I found instead that I was quite delighted.

The production was generally the same as 35+ years ago, albeit much more professionally executed. John Waters, who attended the night before we did, said the show was “better rehearsed,” which has to be the first major understatement of the new decade. It was great to see Scrumbly at work as the de facto orchestra: his appearance in the persona of an escaped, aging Nazi piano-playing female named Ilsa, was terrific, and of course he was the composer of all the songs. And his appearance as Gertrude Stein in the encore hour that followed was marvelous, although he did look a bit like the Church Lady. Unfortunately Rumi wasn’t present to reprise her role that night as the original Mother Gin-sling, but we have heard nothing but good reports.

Yet the show was very different than the original version, and if I list some of those differences here, it is not to criticize the present production, which I urge everybody to go to see before it disappears—it’s brilliantly funny entertainment. (If you’d like to see a preview, there are several clips posted on YouTube.)

• The principals in the early 70’s, in addition to the happily surviving Scrumbly and Rumi, included Sylvester, John Rothermel (into whose apartment I moved in the Summer of Love 1967), and Martin Worman (whose poems I published in my small press magazine). It’s hard to see the show without thinking about them, and the AIDS epidemic that took their lives and so many others among the Cockettes.

And I’m not about to publish here how many of them I slept with in those days. I suppose it’s an age problem: there’s no way you can let the Cockettes go, since it was such an enormous experience, but the melancholy that pervades those memories is inescapable, since, young and innocent as we were, there was no way of knowing how it would all turn out.

• The whole gender-fuck aspect was missing in the current show. What was majorly comical about the Cockettes was simply their appearance: slender young men with bushy beards and longhair, wearing dresses and women’s attire from the Goodwill, with fancifully painted faces and perhaps a crazily perched head-dress, and more often than not no underwear. Their appearance was hilarious before they even hit the stage.

Hibiscus, Beloved founder


• The present production includes (gasp!) a substantial number of women, in my view a useful improvement.

• The Cockettes shows at the Palace were performed on the stage of a movie theater which was elevated at a considerable distance away from the audience, in contrast with the cabaret-style atmosphere at the Hypnodrome, which puts the performers right in your face—and in other parts of the anatomy for those in the first row.

• The political consciousness is much more a background issue today. Before they even hit the stage, the Cockettes represented a venomous assault upon Nixon’s America, and a full-scale attack upon “family values.” It would have likewise been clear to everyone that had Pearls over Shanghai been produced even five years earlier, both the performers and the audience would have been carted off to jail.

Daniel Ware as Martha Mitchell (wife of Nixon's attorney general) at Tricia's Wedding—A political affront?



• Early shows at the Palace were pretty disorganized, with long periods of time between numbers, which however meant you could go trolling for sex around the back rows of the theater, and thus find creative ways to dispel the periods of tedium.

• This changed: with time the shows became incredibly popular, so you had to stand in line for an hour in front of the Palace to get a ticket, your bladder bursting from beers consumed at the nearby Capri. Eventually the audience started to dress up the like the Cockettes, creating a festive chaos in the movie theater like nothing seen before or since.

• Of course it goes without saying that everyone was absolutely ripped to the tits, onstage or off. This makes it more than just a little difficult, seen from a distance of 35+ years, to remember the details of the individual shows, but, my God, just to listen to those tunes again and the floodgates open and memories of all the good times come racing back.


[The pictures are screencaps from Bill Weber and David Weissman: The Cockettes.]

Shakin' the Blues Away

All-girl Banjo Orchestra 1928



Or go to YouTube directly. Thanks to http://www.boingboing.net/.