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ABOUT TOWN

Stardate 12192003

The universe always has its way.

Sometimes you think are going in one direction and the universe has another idea in mind.

It was my friend Tamera Ferro’s 28th birthday last Saturday. After going to a Christmas party given by the Larsen-Pomada literary agency , where I met a potential new agent and said hello to Dan Millman who wrote THE WAY OF THE PEACEFUL WARRIOR and had a long conversation about book binding, the arts and crafts movement, beat poets and surviving as an artist, I went to go see Tamera’s band, The Cold War at the Edinburgh Castle on Geary in San Francisco. I looked extra cute. I just got a pair of faux punk plaid suspender pants that had zippers sewn all over them.

Elizabeth Pomada represents my friend Francesca De Grandis whose humor book, A MODERN GODDESS’ GUIDE TO LIFE; HOW TO BE ABSOLUTELY DIVINE ON A DAILY BASIS is being published by Sourcebooks in May. I want to tell you more about it, because everyone wants to know how to be absolutely divine, but that will have to wait until later. Francesca just opened up a web store called Sacred Toys. The publisher is marketing the book as a humor book even though Ms. De Grandis is a nationally recognized leader in the Goddess Spirituality movement. So if out of one side of my mouth, I call Francesca a humorist, and the other side, I call her a spiritual leader, you’ll just have to let your own brain handle the juxtaposition. Is she a shaman or a writer? Is she an interfaith spiritual activist or a witch? I guess it all depends on what day you meet her. I just take her teleseminars and I don’t even try to understand the place where the waters of marketing meet the waters of reality.

On the same shopping trip where I picked up that pair of plaid pants, I found a pair of kick-ass combat boots at Mars Mercantile, a recycled clothing store on Telegraph in Berkeley. They were only 30 dollars, my size and old, but never worn and extraordinarily well made. Along with my new boots and the plaid pants, hemmed with safety pins, I wore a short-sleeved black shirt with a short black tie with an ankh tie tack. The whole thing was brought together with a black belt with two rows of silver studs and a row of silver skull-and-crossbones cabochons. Somehow I managed to come off as being in my mid-twenties, rather than 34. Although that wasn’t the intention, but I thought it was interesting how I managed to shave off ten years with just an outfit.

While I was the token fashion plate at the writer’s party, I was just another spot of vanity in the well-put-together DIY fashion crowd at the Cold War show.

There isn’t much going on in the way art/fashion/music/politics these days. Even Williamsburg, the new hipster ghetto in Brooklyn isn’t exactly a Mecca for the avant-garde as much as artsy farts with money. I’m just glad there is anything going on at all. People always complain that the coolest things eventually get co-opted by the mainstream and then become lame. I don’t mind that so much, I just wish some of the ideology of sub-cultural art/fashion/music/politics would follow the outer image into the mainstream.

Unfortunately, it never does. Hip Hop got eviscerated. Punk got eviscerated. House/Rave music got eviscerated. Ska never got popular enough to be eviscerated. And skate/surf culture got watered down and over-commercialized. It’s hard for Fifth Avenue to get behind an aesthetic that has built into it an ideology that subverts the values of Fifth Avenue vis-à-vis Culture For Sale. (Or as Malcolm McLaren, who invented THE SEX PISTOLS so artfully described it … Cash From Chaos.) Those other movements had to be divorced of its sting, de-venomized and de-clawed in order for them to become multi-million dollar cultural cash cows. It’s really all about image anyway. That’s why going to parties where everyone is fashionable and attractive is really boring and why looking at magazines with those same people is very pleasurable. The images inspire me, but the lack of cultural ideas and conversation is always a disappointment for me.

But I digress.

Spector Protector, a kind of Throbbing Gristle, Bauhaus industrial electronic two-man wall of angst, opened up for them.

Here is a review of a show they played in August by SF blogger Greg Bolsinga (http://www.io.com/~bolsinga) that I don’t necessarily agree with.

So the Eagle Tavern is a leather gay bar. On Thursdays they have punk rock shows. A friend invited me that had been there before and there was going to be a group of folks, so I put my (irrational?) fears behind and went to the show. This place was playing gay porn when I got in. There were also all of these ridiculous drawings of large hairy men on the walls. But this was a rock show. The first band, Spector Protector, did not deliver. They seemed to be trying to do some sort of a Throbbing Gristle thing, but it simply didn't work. Von Iva were rocking. She's a powerful front woman, no doubt about it. Extreme Elvis was there. They rocked. They are hot. There were plenty of lesbians there. It was a smorgasbord of sub-sub-cultures.

I was surprised we came up with the same template for comparison. I guess the influence of Throbbing Gristle is still being felt. We aren’t far enough away from some of the big bangs in rock and Electronica and “art” bands in the late 70’s to be anything but still evolving in their shadows rather than generating something entirely new. Because of the Internet, nothing that relates to culture or media is insulated. Small, underground scenes do not benefit from the feedback loop effect the way they did before 1995. We really are living in a historically unprecedented electronic global village, just as Marshall McLuhan predicted would happen..

After the show we all went back to Tamera’s studio loft to have cake. The cake was a chocolate ice-cream cake with a photo of Johnny Rotten painted in frosting on the top.

Someone put the Siouxsie and the Banshees album JUJU on the turntable and the cake made it’s way around the party.

Did I mention it was raining?

At the show I ran into another friend, Wendy, who I can’t believe is already 23. I met her when she was barely 16 and she was traveling around the country living with people she met through the Internet, eventually marrying an English ex-patriate who she divorced a year later and then moved out to San Francisco where she fell in with the technology/music/fashion/art obsessed crowd I hung out with. She started dating this surly punk rock guy Erik, who I used to have a crush on because he was mildly intellectual and good with tools and had a big, giant … record collection. They broke up recently and she started going out with this guy who just moved from Portland, Oregon to a warehouse in Oakland not a week ago. She tells me Erik is not talking to her, currently.

It was the Boyfriend’s first night in the actual city of San Francisco. Wendy and her boyfriend are both Vegans and punk fashionistas and he is probably an art-school refugee. He painted on his shoulder bag (an urban survival necessity – the messenger bag in its multi-various forms) an abstract painting of an insectoid/humanoid women being vaginally penetrated by the proboscis of an insectoid/humanoid man. Wendy gave him the “wendy” tour of The City earlier that day, pointing out the appropriate places to shop, dine (Herbivore, Ananda Fuara), rent movies (Leather Tongue), be seen and acquire records (Aquarius on Valencia). Never mind that they are part of the massive displacement of the San Francisco art community to converted warehouses in the low-rent areas of economically depressed neighborhoods in Oakland, CA. It’s no longer a community, it is now a Diaspora.

I should mention, but it goes without saying, that these are all politically impassioned outspoken people with very left leaning tendencies, hence art/music/fashion/POLITICS.

Wendy and the Boyfriend needed a ride to Tamera’s. I had just moved back to Marin County after staying with some friends in another part of the Bay Area and I still had most of the stuff from the move in my car. I piled everything into one side of the back seat and the trunk. Wendy, who is a little bean, squeezed into the back seat and the boy sat in the front.

Automobiles Will Momentarily Float

We drove over to the loft. The parking lot was mostly reserved parking and the few free parking spots were taken so I parked in a No Parking zone in a loading dock where the garbage containers were. I was only going to be there a few hours so I was in no danger of getting towed. Tamera and the rest of the band were taking the band equipment to the storage place and we had a few minutes to wait. The rain is coming down and beating on the roof of my car. The boy asks if he can smoke. No, not in my car, and preferably not at all. So he gets out and Wendy joins him. I realize how stupid it is to sit in the car while they run off to shelter to smoke, so I get out to hang with them while they kill themselves.

We are huddled near the door under an overhanging and someone comes along and gets buzzed in. We hold the door open and go hang out in the hallway outside Tamera’s door. Eventually everybody else shows up and we go inside. People are taking off their coats and draping them over the pipes in the hallway of the former warehouse turned into lofts.

I don’t bother returning to my car. Almost immediately after getting inside, someone looks outside the window. “Oh my god, you should see how much water is pouring down the street! It’s a flash flood!”

So we all go over the window and watch as the loading dock fills up immediately with water and my car floats away.

Bye, Car. I thought it might be a good idea to rescue my laptop so I go into the knee deep water, try to remember where the ramp is and where the pit is so I don’t fall into chin deep water and pull my car back to a more shallow part of the dock. The trunk is almost completely full of water but luckily my laptop is at the very top of everything and just above the water line. The inside of my car is filled with water up the middle of the steering wheel. And my car is floating.

On the way back up the ramp, I miscalculated and fell into waist deep water and held my laptop in its case above my head and crawled up the embankment into water that was still a foot and half high. The water was, in fact, seeping into the building through the front door. Tamera gave me a sarong and a slightly too small t-shirt to wear and I took my wet clothes to the laundry room and put them in the dryer. It wasn’t a flattering outfit but I only had to wear it for half an hour.

I have a lot of unsaved, important work on my laptop and I was just thinking the day before that I ought to get a Zip drive and back up what amounts to my life’s work.

Upstairs everyone is telling me how sorry they are about my car but I shrug it off. It’s not a tragedy, just an annoyance. It also means I won’t be returning to Los Angeles until (if) I manage to get a new one. I have six weeks until I’m expected back at the Malibu homestead, so we’ll see what happens. In the meantime, I went ahead and started fishing around for a desk job in San Francisco even though in six weeks I’m supposed to go back to L.A. Jobs are like spouses, or children, or pets. You can’t just ignore them and do what you want to do when you want to do it.

I called my friend Gigi to find out if she was still in the city on her way home. It was about 3am and a Saturday night/Sunday Morning so chances were pretty good she’d be out there still.

She was at a restaurant with a friend and was just then getting ready to head back to Marin. She came by and picked me up and I went home, slightly befuddled. The flood damaged no other car in San Francisco and my car was only damaged because I was parked in an area that caught all the water as it rushed down the hill.

The next day I had the car towed to a Honda service station to get a repair estimate for the insurance but then I find out that I don’t have flood insurance. The day after that I went down to assess the damage myself. My camera was ruined, the machine I use to do phone interviews with was wrecked, all my paper files that travel with me were ruined, and my clothes, that I had just washed and neatly folded were now a sopping wet pile. The inside of the car was coated with a layer of mud and silt and the two crates of books I had in the trunk were also completely water-logged.

While there though, I had a bit of luck. One of the mechanics was interested in buying the car. I told him I would hold off calling a junking/parts service until I heard back from him and he has yet to get back to me. And so far I haven’t been able to find anyone who can come down with me during the day to salvage what can be salvaged. It’s an awful lot of stuff to carry on the bus.

God is a Fickle Dame

My roommate keeps asking me, “What are you going to do?” I tell him that I’ll just take care of it one step at a time and let it unfold. I’ll know what to do when I need to know it. It’s the kind of thing I could throw money at to fix it, if I had any money. But like most people, I have to come up with creative solutions, hold out for a miracle, get the timing right and rely on whatever shreds of community I have to resolve this with as soft a financial blow as possible.

The mechanic who is interested in the car wants to rebuild it as a project. I quoted him a good price and asked him if that was too high. He said, “kind of.” So I skimmed off 700 dollars. I figure we are all in this half-sunk boat together, frantically bailing out water to stay afloat. I need to get what I can, but I want to help him get what he wants also.

For lots of people who live hand to mouth, a couple hundred dollars means the difference between paying rent and getting the electrical bill paid. ROSEANNE was masterful at illustrating working-class and middle-class financial conundrums with enough humor to make it bearable.

After I resigned myself to the reality of what happened, I poked around Tamera’s studio. One of her incarnations is a clothing designer and she had a rack of her Dainty and Dirty line in her sewing area. I idly flipped through a stack of silk-screened cloth patches on the ironing board and noticed she had a surger.

I started learning clothing construction just before Burning Man so I could make myself costumes and a surger is one of the tools necessary to get a professional, finished edge. Anyone who invests in a surger is serious about sewing. A light industrial model costs 1,000 dollars. An industrial model is 3,000. I begged her to let me come over and use her sewing machines and she said, “Anytime.”

Score!

Now I can redesign some of my old clothes. I was looking through this book of Japanese street fashions at Gigi’s and got wistful for the days when we used to be more expressive and energetic in how we dressed. So I decided to get more DIY with my clothes and do some alterations. I need more funky, fun clothes and I’ll just have to design them myself if I want what I want. Yay for friends who are clothing designers and costumers.

Because my camera is toast, and it was an eight hundred dollar camera and my writing career is not as robust as I’d like, ABOUT TOWN is going to forgo the candid shots for a while. Who knows what will happen though. Weird shit always comes out of the blue. I gave up trying to control my life years ago and now I just go with whatever God has in mind because she’s going to get her way anyway.

Not that I believe that my life is in the hands of God, but a friend of mine has a joke, “If you want to make God laugh, tell her your plans.”

Outside of being kind of Taoist and Zen and intellectual about what meaning is held in the things that happen, I do try to practice non-attachment and being in the moment and letting life occur at the point of observation and stay optimistic that the universe is conspiring with me in my best interest.

It helps the bright points in the desperate and dreary sphere of humanity pop out a little bit more.

There is a jewelry designer in San Francisco named Jan Michaels and every year she opens up her warehouse for a party and a wholesale sale. Gigi (Fierro) was a featured artist this year and I took some photos of the event, which I can’t show you now.

So I got Gigi to not only let me run a couple of the photos that were in the show, but also a photo series she did on six of the seven deadly sins. The archival digital prints from the show are for sale, by the way.

The sin theme is apropos of nothing. I hope I don’t give the impression that I think bad things happen to people because they sin. Or that God was punishing me in any way. I just think the Barbie concept is very cute. FYI, the seven deadly sins concept is a product of the medieval church rather than New Testament scripture and rather Pauline in it’s attempt to not just split the body from the spirit but to abnegate the body completely and focus solely on the spirit (or soul) of the individual as the only worthwhile aspect of the human being. Somehow, denying the body saves the soul. Hence, strictures against lust, and gluttony. Especially lust. The idea that for hundreds of years, there have been people who just accept the idea that pro-creative sex in the context of a marriage is the only form of sex that God smiles upon just blows me away since it is so obviously not the case in nature.

Six of the Seven Deadly Sins – a photo essay by Gigi Fierro

That’s what I get for studying medieval culture in college. Be careful what you study in college. It will haunt your thoughts for years afterwards.

I’ve been reading a lot about the native California tribes recently and people often described the native peoples as unclothed savages or expressed outrage that men and women could openly see each other’s genitals. Did you know that the native California tribes represented over a hundred distinct language groups? Considering all these tribes lived in close proximity of each other for hundreds or perhaps thousands of years, it’s amazing there was such cultural and linguistic diversity. There really is no such thing as “the” Native American. It was readily agreed though, that the Spanish missionaries, led by Junipero Serra, were largely responsible for the demise of the native California “Indians.”

The missionaries job was to convert the natives and Europeanize them and clear a path for Spanish colonization but what happened was that the converted natives became forced laborers in what were essentially labor camps and prisons and tortured and routinely beaten for disobeying or running away. After the Missions were dissolved, Mexican ranchers “inherited” many of the enslaved Indians from the Spaniards. Many of the natives died of disease or were not able to have children because of the gender segregation in the missions.

Most native tribes had a shaman, though, and that shaman was generally a woman. We tend to think of religious leaders as men because of the historical domination of Christianity over the religious life of Western Culture. It never occurred to me that the Medicine MAN is actually the Medicine WOMAN. I don’t know how deep matrifocal tribal spiritual leadership was proliferated among native American groups, though.

Anyway, Merry Christmas, Happy Chanukah. Blessed Solstice. Merry X-mas. Etc. Etc. I won’t be back with another ABOUT TOWN until Boxing Day (December 26th), wherein I shall talk a lot about the Christmas, I’m sure, and whatever entertainment related thing happens between then and now.