Charles Bukowski (1920-1994): A friend of mine recently found himself in the bustling metropolis of San Pedro, California, the whimsically dumpy harbor area of Los Angeles, famous for not really a whole lot else as far as I know other than being where the Great American 20th Century Poet Charles Bukowski is buried, underneath a modest in-ground marker that reads “Don’t Try.” This was, of course, the advice Bukowski gave, while he was still alive, to poets, writers, and everyone else looking to become the type of person that makes a city famous for being buried in it. But in death, I think it was his advice to humanity in general, his final pearl of wisdom imparted to mankind. Don’t try, at anything. Just be. There’s a certain amount of disingenuousness inherent in this statement; after all, when Bukowski was still just a alcoholic mailman, sending hand-copied manuscripts to magazines and publishers, he was definitely trying. And you don’t write as many poems, novels, and screenplays as Bukowski did during his life without putting out some effort. But just like the more spiritual epitaphs usually found on the gravestones of the honest Christian men, Don’t Try is more of the goal, the life’s lesson learned. It’s the advice Bukowski would have given to himself, a fittingly narcissistic thought for a man who made a career out of relating his sexual exploits, drunken loutishness and otherwise self-serving behavior. He was like Thoreau with a taste for booze, choosing the slums of LA, instead of Walden Pond, as his personal purgatory, with women and barflys serving as his woodchucks, ants, and squirrels. And like Thoreau, he didn’t remain there forever; after the slums had served their purpose he moved on, eventually living, and eventually dying, in the comparatively upscale San Pedro, a white wine-sipping old timer. My friend went to the graveyard to pay his respects. The people there had no idea what he was talking about. They finally looked it up, gave him directions and sent him out there; no historical monument, no literature about the life and work of the late great Charles Bukowski. Just a plot number. He found the grave, there with all the other graves. There was nothing spectacular about it. It could have been the grave of anyone, and I guess it is, as far as most people are concerned. Except it says, right on there. Don’t Try.

Matt Hogan (1953-2008): As befitting the subject matter, my friend regaled me with the tale of his pilgrimage over Bloody Marys at Duffy’s, at a time when most people were still eating Cheerios. We had the bartender put a stick of Jerky in each drink, to make more of a meal out of it, and honest breakfast, so as to not feel entirely worthless, like the semi-employed, childless, aging pseduo-hipsters we were, and still are. But really, why does it matter? Why does it matter that you’re drinking, in the morning, on a week day? What is this puritan guilt we still foist upon ourselves, striving to “succeed,” to own more than the next guy, to leave the world with more than we came into it with. Why is it that, to spend the morning working towards some material end is somehow more honorable than spending the morning working towards a more “spiritual” end, and by spirits, I don’t mean ghosts. Why do we seem to seek, as a culture, this accumulation of wealth, of goods, of house and home? So we can stuff it all into our tomb like modern day King Tuts, and take it with us to the afterlife? For most, the motivation is to someday attain their idea of the “good life,” or more importantly, to leave their children with something better than what they themselves had, and this is indeed, a noble thought, but something of a mixed message. After all if the goal of hard work is to provide an easier, more comfortable life, why not just skip the hard part and go about living an easier, more comfortable life now? And if hard work, and earning your keep by the sweat of your physical, or intellectual brow, is the ultimate imperative for honorable living, why seek to deprive your children of this great honor by way of inheriting the fruits of your lifelong own labors? Our friend Thoreau had much to say on this subject, as in the opening pages of Walden: “I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in. Who made them serfs of the soil? Why should they eat their sixty acres, when man is condemned to eat only his peck of dirt? Why should they begin digging their graves as soon as they are born? The portionless, who struggle with no such unnecessary inherited encumbrances, find it labor enough to subdue and cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh.” As we sat, my eye wandered up past the painting of Jesus playing baseball, to the glass case housing Matt Hogan’s old Danelectro guitar, with the inscription, “The Incredible Diamond.” It doesn’t say Don’t Try, but it doesn’t have to.

Photo by Jason Zubia

Please God Save Us
By Derek Hess and Kent Smith
Strhess Press

We should all know about the Bush administration recklessly imposing Christian ideology, reconfiguring our tax structure to favor the wealthy, decimating decades worth of environmental protection policies and starting two wars which have proved costly and difficult to escape. But Please God Save Us is a unique piece of rhetoric plainly detailing these trends with the shocking statistics to back up its assertions and capturing the angst of pacifists and earth-lovers with painstaking clarity.
Pairing Kent Smith’s collection of facts and analysis with inflammatory anti-Republican art creates a jarring, concise and accurate reminder of liberals’ pent-up frustration concerning Bush and his cronies. While cataloging climate change statistics produces surprise, Derek Hess’ art makes one feel gut-wrenching outrage. Grim red elephant trunks bend upwards into billowing smokestacks as they tread across fallen polar bears. Religious figures ride these elephants, their torsos draped with American flags, through clear-cut forests drenched in acid rain, surrounded by filthy industrial backdrops. Hess’ Crosstika shows how hijacked and sullied the true meaning of Christianity has become and is backed by Smith’s pointed criticism of the party whose behavior strays so drastically from the morals they espouse.
Basically, if you’re mad as hell about the last eight years, this nifty and glossy graphic novel will echo your sentiments. The striking images and disgusting indictments are not for the faint of heart, but with the stakes so high, we cannot afford to bury our heads in the sand.
Bill Kelvin

A dear family friend, Linda, gave my mother a book that she published called Tattered and Lost Vol 1.
It is a collection of “found photos” or Vernacular Photography; images that have slipped through the cracks of time to end up in a shoebox or junk drawer. The book is a lot of fun.
Of course you should go buy it now and give it to your friends. But that’s not the only reason for this post.
While reading the book, I saw some good ol URL action on the inside cover and said,

“Hey Ma!, Is Linda doin this with a web presence as well?”

She wasn’t sure so I looked in to it and sho’ nuff. There are 3 blogspot sites that hover around Linda and her wonderful perspective as the keeper of these lost souls.

Here are the first two photographs that started my collecting. I bought these a very long time ago in an antique store in the Sierra foothills. I think I paid 50 cents or a dollar each. I know it wasn’t much. I’ve always wondered how these two ended up in an historic California gold mining town

If you enjoy old photos and like trying to put a story to them, I suggest you spend some time with the sites, and then buy her book.  Shes a nice lady.  Buy the dang book.  Thanks.

Tattered and Lost VERNACULAR PHOTOGRAPHY
Tattered and Lost EPHEMERA
Tattered and Lost FOUND PHOTOS

Click To Buy

As he nears the 23 year anniversary of his first contact with “the visitors,” Communion author and famous, if not infamous, paranormal icon Whitley Streiber is still struggling to be taken seriously, and he’s not too happy about it:

It is late here, midnight passing. December has come again, and for the past few months I have been enduring the same demonic nights that I experience every year at this time, as my spirit relives the hard pilgrimage that led to the night of December 26, 1985.

The feelings are so complex, the fears so deep and the love, too, so deep, that sometimes, even after all these years,the whole emotional avalanche of having the visitors emerge into my life threatens to drown me.

It was not all bad, not by any means, and that what makes my present condition so hard. I have lost loves, great loves, towering loves, left behind me a life and experiences that are somewhere close to the pinnacle what can happen to a living man.

I know that what I did is considered nothing–the foolish bagatelles of a pitiful man with a deranged imagination, or even a frank liar–but it was all real, and there was far more of it than I have ever said, and I am so lonely now that it is a physical agony, and yet, along with the loneliness there is also a fear that is greater than my blood, greater than my soul, I would think, that breaks me on its wheel in these lonely hours in the early winter, every year.

I have lived most of my life, and over its course been given a great blessing, to see truly and accurately to a land beyond death, and see its sacred population, and even gain friends there.

But what did it mean? Is there really an afterlife, or was it a trick to force me into the state of question in which I now live? Am I standing before a door, or, like Tantalus, doomed to forever seek a meal I will never consume in the form of answers I will never receive.

I am deeply, profoundly angry at the way I have been treated by the world. I brought one of the premiere human experiences to the surface and my reward has been a mock Science Fiction Hugo, and to become a star of the television show Southpark as the victim of a ‘rectal probe’–the character skillfully changed, of course, so that I could not sue or claim theft of my story.

I mean, I guess I feel his pain. But what do you expect, when you say that non-human entities have embued you, and seemingly you alone, with the knowledge needed to save mankind from certain destruction, while they weren’t anally raping and otherwise terrorizing you? I mean, at least you got Christopher Walken to play you in a movie. That’s a lot more than most people ever get out of life. I certainly hope that Streiber is not deranged, is not somehow out of his mind; what he’s talking about is a lot cooler than just being some hunk of accidentally slapped together molecules living and dying a meaningless life on some stupid planet in an ever expanding universe. That shit would suck.

So yesterday I was hung over and emo, suffering from mud butt and sitting on the shitter for extended perids of time, because I was too lazy to get up and come back. I read some Joseph Conrad, but dude is always kind of a bummer: he pulled an Elliott Smith way before it was cool (he used a gun instead of a knife, and lived to write another day, but close enough). In search of something hopefully a little more uplifting, I set into the copy of Mark Oliver Everett’s Things the Grandchildren Should Know sent to me last week by the wonderful folks at St. Martin’s. Everett, of course, is better known to the masses as E, the mad genius behind rock band Eels. He is also perhaps lesser known as the son of legendary physicist Hugh Everett III, who coined the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum physics, the idea -to put it much too simply- that everything that could possibly happen is happening, and/or has already happened in some other parallel world running simultaneous in time to ours (take a bong rip of Salvia and it’ll make way more sense). Anyways, Mark Everett is definitely an interesting person, so his book sounded like some nice light Sunday reading, right? Within the first couple of pages, his sister’s boyfriend attacks him with a knife, his sister attempts suicide for the first time (it took a couple tries before she got it right) E finds his dad dead of a heart attack at 51, and contemplates suicide himself as he visualizes driving off a bridge: Not exactly Chicken Soup for the Soul. That being said though, E’s self-effacing, conversational writing style, coupled with the already stated unique aspects of his life make Things the Grandchildren Should Know the kind of book you can’t, and won’t put down (I didn’t until I fell asleep). Though I’m only halfway through, I can already tell this will be a book I’ll be including in my yearly effort to make my friends and family smarter by buying them books for Christmas. It’s up for pre-order now on Amazon, and comes out next Monday. If you’re not really a book person (which isn’t likely since you’ve read this post this far) you can also get the gist of Everett’s life in the PBS special “Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives” airing October 21st at 8 PM. Or you could just watch the video for “Novocaine for the Soul” and call it good. Your call.

As fitting a Monday morning, a colleague and I were discussing the works of Herman Melville, and Moby Dick, aside, I am still convinced that his most accessible, and for the most part enjoyable work is Typee. (click the link to read it for free on Google books…if you’re really that bored). However, a less known branch of Melville’s work are his short stories, which are as deeply symbolic and as representative of his darkly humorous (at least to me) writing style as his more substantial tomes. Below is delicious copy-pasta of perhaps my favorite of these short stories, Cock-a-Doodle-Do: Or, The Noble Cock Beneventano. Enjoy, or don’t. (more…)