Beat the Devil

CODA Magazine turns 50 but is still younger than me

noreply@blogger.com (Brian Nation) — Thu, 08 May 2008 03:31:00 +0000

Coda celebrates its 50th anniversary today. This Canadian magazine was once one of the best jazz magazines in the world. Maybe it still is but I don't read jazz magazines these days so wouldn't know. I first came across it around 1960, at the Record Centre on Crescent Street in downtown Montreal. Run by the professorial but cool Edgar Jones, the Record Centre was a lending library with a fair-sized and eclectic collection of albums. Every week or so I'd go down and get a few albums, fifty cents each for one week's rental, everything from Wozzek to Wilbur Ware. Jones asked me what kind of music i liked when I signed up and I said everything. "You're tastes are catholic, then?" and I went home and looked up what he meant by "catholic" to make sure i wasn't gonna have to confess my sins at some point. There was usually a small stack of these Coda magazines on a table by the door – a mimeographed and stapled letter-sized journal which I picked up regularly, thereby enhancing my musical scholarship. There were so many places in those days outside of so-called school where i was coming by my real education.

Some years later Jane and I hitchhiked to Toronto for a couple of days . . . my first and second-to-last time in that city. She took me to Sam's Records to introduce me to John Norris who presided over the second-floor all jazz and blues department. Norris was the founder, editor, and publisher of Coda. Due to confusion and disarray where Jane and I were staying, later that day I went back to the store and asked Norris if he'd put me up for one night. He didn't hesitate, suggesting I come by his apartment around six and have dinner with he and his wife. As impressive as the Norris' hospitality, was John's record collection taking up an entire wall in the sizable living room. I'd never seen anything like it and I'm telling you it was mind-altering experience, just looking at it. I'm guessing 10,000 albums. "Put something on," John says. Are you kidding??? I was nonplussed. John eventually found something to play. It took many years to get that great wall of vinyl out of my mind and have since seen bigger collections, but still . . .

As it turned out, the newest issue of Coda was being put together that night, which involved a bit of a party, including a half-dozen or so friends and Coda contributors, plus plenty of wine and snacks. Stacks of mimeographed pages had to be collated, stapled, some stuffed in envelopes to be mailed to subscribers. I was an expert at this type of thing so was happy to be able to organize the work, cutting the usual amount of time it took so that there was more time for partying and listening to some of John's records.

Among the partyers/collators was a handsome young man (six years older than me) from Bristol, England – William Ernest Smith, better know, oddly enough, as Bill Smith. Bill was eventually an editor of the magazine, in addition to his other contributions to modern music as saxophonist, clarinetist, composer, editor, photographer, and film and record producer. He eventually moved to Hornby Island and I'm happy to report that all these many decades later we are still friends. Norris I haven't seen since the mid-seventies, sad to say.

When Jane and I hit the road back to Montreal, Norris asked if I'd deliver some copies of the new Coda to his friend and Coda contributor, Len Dobbin. So that's when I first met Dobbin, for about fifty years the dean of the Montreal jazz scene.

John visited Vancouver around 1974 and was a house guest of Fraser Nicholson, owner of the famous Record Gallery on Robson Street, my main source of jazz records for many of my Vancouver years. By then I was working at the Georgia Straight, heading up the distribution department. Besides the Straight itself we handled a number of the hipper papers and magazines, including Rolling Stone when it was actually a small alternative news, music, and culture rag. I suggested John send me fifty copies of every Coda and I'd put them into book and record stores and a few of the bigger newsstands. He agreed, observing, "Gosh, we've never had a distributor before." So, adding to my achievements, I became the first distributor of Coda Magazine.

By the late seventies author and musician David Lee was co-editing Coda with Bill Smith. I met him during one of his visits to Vancouver. He told me that the notices I was sending to Coda via John Norris, about the series of concerts I was producing here, were being greeted with amazement. I treated David to dinner at the Nanking in Chinatown for the sole purpose of talking his ear off for a couple of hours about all that I was up to, my hopes and dreams, and pretty much my whole life story as it pertained to jazz and its variants in the last third of the twentieth century. After that I took him to a party at Patricia LaNauze's place and for all I know it was the best night of his life. But there was no payoff for me because . . . I don't know . . . I thought there'd be something at some time in the magazine which, as far as I know, there never was. That would have been pretty helpful to the cause, I think.

As of 2000 the magazine has changed hands twice and is still being published. I can't compare the current magazine to what it was in the early years but it seems to still be a very good jazz magazine, despite the fact that my name has never appeared in it. Although my first effort as a record producer made two top-ten lists in their Best of 2007 issue a few months ago. More about that tomorrow.

Photo above of Bill Smith (left) and John Norris in the seventies by unidentified photographer.

sarah silverman part 2

noreply@blogger.com (Brian Nation) — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 04:15:00 +0000

sarah and i get a little closer

photo by Guy MacPherson

Sarah Silverman is hot, isn't she? The hottest. Even Barbara thinks so, except she wouldn't say hot. And she's funny as hell. The funniest. Sharp. I'm crazy about her. Her TV show is one of only about three that I ever watch. I'm very particular. Or do I mean peculiar? I get those words mixed up.

Two years ago I explained how I was seduced by a photo of Sarah Silverman in an old New Yorker magazine that lay open on a pile of other magazines in my apartment for several weeks or months. It was sort of like the portrait of Laura Hunt (Gene Tierney) that Detective Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews) eventually falls for, except that I knew Sarah hadn't been murdered. And I didn't actually fall in the usual sense of "falling". Since then I've become her biggest fan, although not as crazed as the boys who've been going around town stealing piles of Georgia Straights out of vending boxes for her cover photo. And these Straight boxes are two or three on every block around here so I've been seeing a lot of Sarah lately.

The reason for the cover story is that Sarah blew through town on the weekend for a show at the River Rock Casino in Richmond, to which our mutual friend Guy MacPherson (who wrote the story) invited me. I had to pass on seeing Bill Coon's guitar genius band at Cap College to catch her. In fact I risked my life as despite being the end of March a freezing sonofabitch hailstorm blew in from Russia (I thought the fucking Cold War was over!) and I don't like being on the roads here at the best of times. I thought I'd probably die an icy death on the way to Richmond but I took that chance.

Sarah's show was great. I'm not a comedy critic (that's Guy's job) so won't elaborate. I loved it. How could I not? Some familiar stuff and some new stuff and Sarah's just fun to be around when she's on stage, and off as well, as it turns out.

We went backstage and hung out for an hour I'm guessing. I haven't met many comics but the few I have were not that funny in real life. I'm funnier in real life but if I got on stage I'd be shot. But Sarah's funny and warm and well . . . as much as you can tell in an hour . . . real . . . and a sweetheart! I'm still crazy about her.

Guy MacPherson and Sarah Silverman

Tomorrow: Running into Woody Allen at City Lights Books in 1963

Links:
Sarah Silverman at Wikipedia
Sarah Silverman Show at Wikipedia
Sarah Silverman Show at Comedy Central
Sarah Silverman article by Guy MacPherson, in the Georgia Straight

Henry Miller

noreply@blogger.com (Brian Nation) — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 00:40:00 +0000

One day I decided to call Henry Miller. I dialed "O" and asked for Monterey California information. The operator I got sounded like someone Miller and I would have fought a duel over. "I'm looking for the number for Miller, Henry Miller, in Big Sur". She was sympathetic. "Oh," she said, "people like that never have their numbers listed." We chatted for about two minutes. If I knew then what I know now (which isn't all that much more, really) I'd have persisted and gotten the number somehow . . . maybe.

This is my favourite photograph of Miller, taken by Harry Redl. I don't think it's ever been published or shown anywhere. Harry described the day he visited Miller and was taking a few pictures of the author with his tripod-mounted Rollei. Miller asked him to take some pictures of his watercolours and brought them out and leaned them against a stone wall. Harry got out another camera, took some shots, and turned around just in time to see Miller sneaking up on his Rollei, to grab a shot of him.

I never did talk to or meet Henry Miller and despite all my unsubtle hints Harry never gave me a print of this photo. The one you see here is taken off Harry's business card and is reproduced twice the original size – thus its inferior quality.

This almost insignificant anecdote was prompted by having just watched this wonderful short film:

Dinner With Henry (1979)
Director: Richard Young

a score for cecil taylor

noreply@blogger.com (Brian Nation) — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 09:09:00 +0000

this is the photo of cecil taylor taken by the lovely and talented leslie bell, sister of the handsome and loquacious bob bell, at the legendary vancouver jazz society hall on fourth avenue when i presented the cecil taylor unit (with jimmy lyons, david ware, raphe malik, and beaver harris) for four nights in the spring of 1977

about 1964 somewhere in a magazine or anthology i read a poem entitled a score for cecil taylor (whose name at that time was as yet unknown to me) that so intrigued me that when some time later i spotted an album called cecil taylor live at the cafe montmartre in a record store on ste catherine street i bought it instantly, sound unheard, got home and put it on the Lenco turntable and although i grasped little of what i heard i was nonetheless enthralled by the sounds pouring out of my single mono speaker. everything i heard in music from that point on in my life was altered by this single experience. that night dave and harvey came by and as usual we got high and listened to jazz but when i put this on they decided i had lost my mind and on subsequent evenings it was only by upping the dosage that they were able to yield to my advanced musical choices. (eventually i absorbed taylor's language and his music not only made sense but it was just as likely to move me as a lester young improvisation or johnny dodd's solo on perdido street blues

i wanted to go back and re-read that poem that first sparked my interest but couldn't find it in the volume where i was sure i'd first seen it and i eventually went through every anthology, magazine, broadside, chapbook, and everything else and could never find it. was it a dream?

when i met cecil taylor for the first time in the mid-seventies i told him about how i first became aware of his name through that poem and asked if he knew who had written it and he said he had never seen or heard of it.

so this is a mystery

--

tomorrow: ornette coleman

just another broadcast from Sydney

noreply@blogger.com (Brian Nation) — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 07:45:00 +0000

In his biography of William Burroughs Ted Morgan describes the time in 1975 when Burroughs was visited by Robert Bly.

Bly told the story of how a tribe of Australian aborigines reacted to their first experience with a battery-operated radio. The first thing they heard was the news from Sydney. “Two women were killed this morning and two others were badly burned in a fire that destroyed a roominghouse for the elderly.” Disturbed by the plight of these distant people, the aborigines gathered food and blankets to take to the survivors. Only with difficulty were they convinced that there was nothing that they could do to help. After that, gradually, they began to lose their ability to react to the human and social needs around their village. “So the medicine man breaks a leg,” said Bly, “and they figure, oh well, it's just another broadcast from Sydney.

Literary Outlaw p. 486

press

noreply@blogger.com (Brian Nation) — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 09:20:00 +0000

I forgot to post this review of Benway's Deathbed, by Only Magazine's esteemed film critic, Adam O. Thomas.

As a film critic and writer it is my pleasure to watch all kinds of work whether it be big Hollywood blockbusters or little independent films. As such I have watched your "experimental" film Benway's Deathbed a few times now as it is thankfully short and feel like I may be able to offer some insight as to what it means.

Take the first frame. It is a perforated film frame that precedes the title. This obviously intentional recognition of source is a welcome reminder of a time now long gone. That single frame signals an awareness of the artifice of cinematic construction about to follow, a powerful signal that this is just a film. The simple credits underscore the complicated imagery that lies at the heart of the film and the playful cast credit of "unknown saxophonist" underscores the mystical and philosophical possibilities the film reflects. As if saying "the name is not important but the effect remains." A truly brave statement in a time of endless categorization.

The lingering camera work blends with the tender jazz score to create a haunting atmosphere of uncertainty. We watch, constantly searching for clues, yet the images languish back and forth denying us any, what we film writers would call, action. Murky and bewildering, comparisons to Bergman are inevitable and are overtly reinforced by the scene of a man playing chess against the stuffed bird. Which also invokes a sense of tension because it could also be Hitchcock...but with far fewer birds, so its not quite as scary.

The simplicity of the relationship to music and muse as reflected in the relationship between the saxophonist and the girl is a tender reminder of the simple beauty in life, being sensual or sonic and this operates in powerful contrast to the nihilistic imagery of the aforementioned man versus bird chess match.

Of course all of this could be "bullshit" and the film, made something like 40 years ago could simply be the work of a drug addled beatnik on pot or in the throws of an LSD bender, but it is unlikely you were drunk at the time because so much of the film is in focus. I hope this helps you understand the film you made and also gives you some insight into the powerful and fascinating job we film writers have. Please if you have other films, don't hesitate to send them somewhere else.

You can watch the film again here, no extra charge.

mugs

noreply@blogger.com (Brian Nation) — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 06:41:00 +0000

The jackass in the middle is Gordon Campell, premier of British Columbia. At the time the photo was taken, around 1990, he was mayor of Vancouver. He wanted to be a much, much bigger jackass so he became premier of the whole damn province. Sorry . . . calling him jackass is being too kind. Anyway . . . to his right is Blaine Culling who parlayed a successful restaurant into owning most of the clubs on Granville Street and on the far right is Leonard Schein who parlayed half-ownership in a funky old movie house where his opening night show was Casablanca into a string of semi-artsy movie theatres around town. When I asked him to help me show Jazz on a Summers Day back around 1979 he said it was too much trouble. Yawn. The guy at the other end of the shot . . . I have no idea who that is.

I was riding my bike down Granville Street one morning, on my way to my postal gig, when I spotted these clowns standing around with brooms. Some kind of "let's clean up Granville Street" publicity stunt, I guess. Hauling Campbell outta there would have made it clean enough for me.

Herewith more cute pictures of Campbell, these from 2003, courtesy of the Maui Police Dept. Busted for drunk driving. Had it been me I'd probably have lost my job. But not Campbell. He's only premier.

[To be deleted. No creeps in my blog, please.]

tales of the airport (no. 6)

noreply@blogger.com (Brian Nation) — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 07:34:00 +0000

Al called to ask a favour. Can you pick up Mingus' band at the airport? I had a VW bus and was always happy to help out. Besides . . . Mingus! Of course! He'd been my musical hero since I was 14. Would you drive out to the airport to pick up Mozart? Of course you would. Mingus was an even greater genius.

I called Deborah. I'm picking up Mingus at the airport . . . wanna come along?

It so happened that Warner Bros (Mingus' label at the time) had a guy in Vancouver who loved Mingus. He also showed up at the airport. He brought a limo, a box of Montecristos (Mingus' favourite cigar) and a photographer. To this day I resent that I wasn't the one to wind up in that photo.

More about me and Mingus.

evolution

noreply@blogger.com (Brian Nation) — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 21:02:00 +0000

On July 20, 1969 I'd been staying for a couple of weeks at my friend Marian Seinen's place, in a house so small it was hardly bigger than a doll's house, in the back of a lot by the alley behind the normal sized house in the Kitsilano neighbourhood of Vancouver. My girlfriend at the time, Tassillie, and I had had a bit of a misunderstanding and were temporarily apart. She was a couple of blocks away and visited regularly. Thankfully, we solved our differences and were soon back together. I say "thankfully" because a few weeks later, after we moved together into the communal house at Stephens and Trafalgar (which included amongst the communards the future founder of Caper's stores where I now buy my oats and occasionally have a bowl of their excellent soup), we discovered that she was bearing our child – a condition that directed the course of my life from that point on and resulted in the dynasty of children and grandchildren over which I preside, saving me from a life of aimless wandering and pointless, abeit pleasant, solitude.

But on that date in 1969 this was all as yet unknown to anyone. That morning I sat alone in Marian's tiny living room eating a bowl of oatmeal with the TV on, watching the descent of the lunar module Eagle onto the Moon's surface. At the same time that I was thrilled to be seeing, live as it was happening, human beings jumping around on the moon, I was thinking, for all we know this could have been filmed at any time in a vacant lot in Texas. Or Odessa. But in fact I chose to believe it and still do.

It seemed to me that I was the only person on Earth who heard Neil Armstrong say "that's one small step for man; one giant leap for mankind" and thought, "huh?"

Then a golf ball shot through the window, shattered glass flying in every direction. I went out to investigate, finding the landlady (who lived in the normal-sized house at the other end of the yard) and five or six of her boyfriends playing golf on the lawn, drunk, stupid, and belligerent. Before I opened my mouth they were already yelling at me, the lady informing me that it was her house and she could fire golfballs through any window she pleased. Who the fuck are you? Where the fuck's Marian? Fuck you, she explained. The boyfriends all yelling in agreement. I went back inside to contemplate homo sapiens.

I'd read a lot of science fiction. We met inhabitants of other planets. They'd be wise and benevolent. Or evil and murderous. It was one or the other. Stunted imagination, I think. What would a Martian find on Earth? Astronauts headed for the Moon? Billie Holiday singing Fine and Mellow with Lester Young on tenor? Or assholes whacking golfballs through windows? What about evolution . . . how come we don't all evolve?

My next topic: What did Khrushchev mean by "we will bury you"?

The drawing at the top was one of my first made on a computer . . . with Windows Paintbrush on a 286 PC, around 1989.

saxe

noreply@blogger.com (Brian Nation) — Tue, 25 Dec 2007 07:12:00 +0000

David Daxe, photographed at his home somewhere in a southern U.S. state, via the Internet on December 22, 2007. [See note below.]

Saxe, whom I've known longer than just about anyone still living on this planet, has hardly been mentioned in these pages. That's partly due to the fact that I know he's a regular reader here and so I hesitate to embarrass the fellow.

We were in the same eighth grade class at West Hill but I barely knew him then. Marvin Minkoff whispered to me once that David's brother was a "beatnik" and that was good enough for me. Henry's an artist and that alone made him a beatnik in Minkoff's view. Minkoff once spotted me walking home home with a jazz record in hand (Jazz in Transition, a rare item these days) and that made me a beatnik, too, so there ya go.

I'm not sure what happened between eighth grade (I quit school the following year so that I could get on with my real life) and the Guilbault Street days by which time we were hanging out on a regular basis, listening to and exchanging jazz records, drinking beer nightly at the Swiss Hut, smoking weed, playing snooker at the Montreal Pool Room, and the like. Saxe was a student at the École des Beaux-Arts and was never without his Rapidograph, drawing endlessly on everything and his talent was impressive, to say the least. Eventually he was also carrying a camera around and was already a better photographer than I would ever be, so it's not surprising he's now one of the best and most interesting photographers on the planet.

Speaking of the Internet, I have to say that amongst its many miracles it is wholly responsible for David and I continuing our friendship after all these years. Without it we'd see each other once a decade and perhaps exchange a letter or two in alternate centuries. But in 1992 he was the only person aside from myself with an email address and so we began a correspondence that continues to this day and now comprises over 20,000 pages of text which elucidates the entire history of the second half of the twentieth century. At least as it applied to us.

David is a little older than and an thus I regard him as a mentor and role model. He's not only a better photographer and visual artist in general, he's the world's foremost crank. Next to him I'm a veritable Pollyanna.

David Saxe's photoblog is here. And more photos are in his web gallery here.

NOTE

This is a repost of a previous item. At that time I had not yet taken the photo of Saxe seen above.

I haven't seen him since about 2001, give or take. Thanks to advances in human ingenuity I was able to take that stunning portrait over the Internet using my Olympus digital and David's web cam. What will we think of next, I wonder?

Robert Sinclair / Malvin St Claire

noreply@blogger.com (Brian Nation) — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 05:13:00 +0000

This is actually Quentin Crisp. I have no pictures of Robert Sinclair but there's a strong enough resemblance for this photo to give you a bit of an idea of what Robert looked like forty-odd years ago.

Robert came to work at Chevalier Associates while I was there and we became friends. I had my little mailroom and, like the others that worked there, Robert popped in and out a hundred times a day with printing or mailing jobs. Although I chatted everyone up, with Robert it was a little different. He was one of the smartest and most "cultured" people I'd met and our conversations were always fascinating to say the least.

When I think back and picture him it amazes me to realize that for the longest time I had no idea he was homosexual. He had the big hair, dandy suits, flower in the lapel, and the cologne. His style was utterly gay . . . not as flamboyant as Quentin Crisp, but close. Still, it didn't sink in for the longest time, which is really odd because I was fascinated by queer culture. I'd read City of Night with deep interest, for example. A big part of the fascination was the outlaw nature of it all. I identified majorly with all outlaw, outcast, weird, and unusal non-participants in the mainstream culture for which I had only contempt.

Robert grew up in the Maritimes and was driven out by Maritime society, including his own family. He was an exile. I felt like an exile. We became great friends. When I left Chevalier we'd meet for beer once in a while and I loved visiting him because he had the most interesting books and music, art, etc. I'd never, that I can remember, heard non-Western music before. He wasn't much of a jazz fan but he played Indian ragas and Balinese gamelan records for me which left me gasping for breath. He introduced me to writers I'd never heard of and in fact sometimes copied out passages of books and gave them to me. Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans is an example I never forgot. At my place I introduced him to William Burroughs. He picked up my copy of Naked Lunch and read the entire thing there and then, in front my very eyes which made a big dent in my brain because I've always been a slow reader.

Robert was the first and for many many years the only person I dared show my writing to and . . . who knows . . . if it hadn't been for his insightful comments and encouragement maybe I wouldn't have kept at it. (I would have.) I just didn't have the confidence to go public. But there was something about our friendship that was completely liberating for me. For example, in matters of sex I bullshitted my male friends and put up a cool front with female friends but, shit, here was a guy who actually fucked other guys . . . why would I have shame or secrets of any kind with him? So baring my sexually insecure soul to Robert was a great relief. And he likewise confessed his strange and private activities and lusts.

Robert was involved with an obscure spiritual practice called Subud. It's founder and leader, an Indonesian fellow known as Bapak, would give new names to their members, so Robert Sinclair became Malvin St. Claire. (I introduced my friend Martin Narvey to Malvin. Malvin introduced Martin to Subud and Martin became Valentine Navrolansky, or Narvolansky . . . something like that.) What happened to either of them will remain an unsolved mystery, I suspect. I hit the road and never saw or heard anything about them again and probably never will.

The Return Of The Son Of Monster Magnet

noreply@blogger.com (Brian Nation) — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 19:51:00 +0000

When I walked in the door this was playing. It was so loud I heard it half a block away. Then I plooped down on the sofa and didn't move till it was over.

The album wasn't even out, yet. I think it was Linda who brought it back from San Francisco. She knew all these guys and was always ahead of everyone in all things rock and roll. (Linda was the one responsible for the Grateful Dead spending the night in my room.) A month later I was in Montreal. A friend was coming to visit from New York and I told her, go to Sam Goody's and get me this record. (I figured it had to be out by now.) A week later people were coming by my place just to hear the album.

A couple of months after that the Mothers of Invention were in town for a two-week gig at Gary Eisenkraft's club, the New Penelope. That was just a few doors east of the Swiss Hut where I did most of my drinking. When the Swiss Hut hotties started getting very friendly towards me I had to wonder what made me so attractive all of a sudden. One sweetiepie in particular sat down at my table and asked, batting her eyeballs at me, so how long you guys gonna be in town? That explains it! They think I'm in the band. It was the hair.

This portrait of me, taken by Serena when she was a student at L'Ecole des Beaux-Arts, might explain some of the confusion on the part of the Swiss Hut Hotties. Long-hair on guys hadn't come in yet, so basically in Montreal it was me, Armand Vaillancourt, and the Mothers of Invention. I wasn't going around with a rose stuck in my teeth and could easily be mistaken by horny girls as a member of a famous U.S. American rock band.

Of course I went to see the band. I might have gone five times. Maybe six. It's all a blur though, by now. I hung out a bit – just a bit – with a couple of the guys including Zappa and Herb Cohen, the Mothers' manager. Cohen's phone number is still in my address book but probably not current. Maybe I'll call him up. Zappa was cool, and a very nice guy, but to recall any conversations at this point I would have to reconstruct my brain as it was then and there aren't enough drugs for that.

So that's as close as I ever got to enjoying rockstar groupie hotelroom frolics and possible plastercasting. If I'd been a little less honest . . . or maybe . . . if I could just remember . . .

AFTERTHOUGHTS

I wouldn't have thought that "tune" would stand the test of forty years – that's how long since I last heard it. After all, the avant garde isn't so avant garde anymore. But I must confess it holds up well and is as subversive as ever. When you consider this was released on MGM records . . . in 1966 . . . it's a kind of miracle.

Calgary

noreply@blogger.com (Brian Nation) — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 07:21:00 +0000

Believe it or not at one time Calgary was, and maybe still is for all I know, the friendliest city on Earth. Well at any rate, on a weekday morning in 1963 it was the friendliest place I'd been to so far in my short life. In just my first couple of hours after being dropped off by my last ride I had been given money by strangers, without my having asked anyone for anything. They could see I was on the road and could probably use a few bucks. At a downtown diner my meal was paid for by another stranger with a smiling face who'd struck up a conversation with me and decided I was worth helping out just because I came from somewhere and was going somewhere else. Where didn't matter.

It didn't stop. My backpack and dusty clothes were an open invitation to everyone to talk to me, give me a buck or two, or just wish me good luck. Someone mentioned that Calgary was a boom town, everybody had money, and so I supposed this in some way explains the everpresent good vibes. On the sunny sidewalk of a downtown street an older gent sidles up next to me and asks me who I am and where I'm headed. What's your name? Smith, I say. In spite of everyone's good nature there still lurks in me a bit of the old suspicions. Really, what's your name, he insists. Why would you lie? So I tell him my name. You're Jewish, aren't you? I confess I am. Well, you should be proud and not making up names. And wherever you go in your travels you should always seek out other Jews. We help each other out. Well, I never thought about it that way before.

Walking along together we came to drycleaner, or it might have been a shoestore, or anything else. It was a long time ago. My name is Engel. This is my business, he said. Why don't you come by at noon, I'll take you to my home for a nice homecooked meal. I have a daughter about your age you can meet, too. Oh boy, I thought. Is this the end of the road for me?

I went back at noon and we drove way out to god knows where. Calgary seemed so huge and empty. We drove past nothing in the way of bars, clubs, joints, or anything, like a vast suburban nowhere. This man was obviously a nice guy and generous but he kept driving in his point about sticking with my own kind. Till then I didn't even realize I had a kind. But there it was. Avoid strangers, he added. It became clear that by "strangers" he meant gentiles. I kept my mouth shut. Well, he's an older guy, probably survived the war in Europe, so I gave him the benefit of the doubt. But inside I was thinking, why travel the world if I'm only going to stick with one kind?

His wife cooked up the best meal i'd had in weeks. Maybe months. Engel licked his lips and got up from the table. I have to get back to work but you can stay a while and relax. Come see me later. His daughter and I retired to the livingroom. Sad to say she was not the least bit attractive to me. A little on the plump side with a plain doughy face but she was sweet as could be. We talked about jazz of all things and what else I can't remember. Plans for the future, no doubt. I wish I could have dug her more. Was the old man in a hurry to unload her? Imagine bringing home a hobo – Jewish hobo, but a hobo – to have lunch and sit in the livingroom with his zaftig princess. Well, she was nice and I hope today she's a happy jazz-loving grandmother but I got up and she told me where to get the bus back downtown. I stood on a hot summer streetcorner in an empty Calgary wasteland till the bus came, then wandered around and went back to the drycleaner's as requested. Or shoestore.

I own an apartment building, Engel told me. There's always an empty apartment. Go see the manager, Mrs Monk, and she'll let you in. You can stay as long as you want. Mrs Monk! I hoped she was distant cousin of the jazz genius, but it was not so. I wandered around Calgary the rest of the day and believe it or not ran into Murray and a little later the rest of the guys with whom I'd recently shared a bit of my westward journey. I was the King of the Road that day because I actually got us an apartment. Later that night the five of us went to the apartment and crashed. There was no furniture and we were all sprawled out on the carpeted floor the next morning when we were woken up by the sound of a key in the lock. The door creaked open and, after a short pause, creaked back shut. We all got up and a while later Engel was there demanding the return of the key. Monk had turned us in. I trusted you and you betrayed me . . . you let “strangers” stay in my apartment. It was clear what he meant by “strangers”.

Evicted.

Dale and I decided to head west and made it to Banff within a couple of hours where we soon hooked up again with the others for further adventures in the real world, involving breaking and entering, another eviction, mountain climbing, and a night in jail, to be revealed in an upcoming episode.

baseball

noreply@blogger.com (Brian Nation) — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 08:29:00 +0000

For Bowering

I don't ordinarily dedicate things but I notice that all the best authors and poets do it and so perhaps by doing so I will raise myself a notch in the view of those who might throw me a testimonial dinner one day. In any event, I was looking up George Bowering in the Vancouver Public Library and practically fell over when I saw 83 books listed under his name. I don't have anything under mine, except overdue fines and the like.

Bowering is known to be a lover of baseball and some of the books are either about baseball or have some baseball content. It got me thinking. I'm not a fan of any sport and in fact hate the whole concept of sports, except for pool. I almost got good at pool myself but then my eyes went. Glasses didn't help. Lining up shots the rims always got in the way. By the time I discovered that they made special glasses for pool players it was too late. Also, the only sport I could bear to watch on TV, when I had one, was snooker. Because on TV they can show you the table from directly above, a view not available in most poolhalls.

But I love the sound of baseball. When I was eleven or twelve I spent a few weeks one summer with my cousin who lived in a third-floor walkup on Coney Island Avenue in Brooklyn. Of course he loved the Dodgers and at night we hung out in his room listening to the Dodgers games. He filled me in on who was who but very little of it stuck, nor did I care much, but I found the sound of the play-by-play, crowd noises in the background, and the thwack of bat on ball a great pleasure to hear. It was like a leisurely sonata that ambled along for a couple of hours on summer nights. After that when my Dad was listening to ball games in the kitchen while my mother watched old movies on the TV downstairs I'd go in there and hang out with him, paying no attention whatsoever to the game itself but just enjoying the sound of it as I putzed around the kitchen.

One day, a year or so after that Brooklyn summer I received a gift from my cousin. He'd caught a home run ball hit into the stands by Duke Snider. After the game he waited by the Ebbets Field exit and got Snider to sign the ball and in a gesture of the greatest generosity I have ever benefited from he sent it to me. I absolutely did not deserve that ball because within weeks, after taking it out to the street to play with . . . or whatever I did . . . I lost it. I hope I'm not being too unsentimental when I say that today that ball would be worth a million dollars.

Some years after that I watched a TV interview with a guy who had done baseball play-by-play for an independent radio station somewhere in some small town in the middle of America. Small stations couldn't afford the live network feed so guys like this kept track of game action via the incoming teletype and re-enacted the game as though live from the stadium right there in the studio complete with a battery of sound effects. Tape loops of crowd sounds (ooohs, ahhs . . cheers . . . and ambient noises) the bat on ball thwack, etc. Rather than being disillusioned I loved the idea of a game broadcast so pure there was no game itself. The teletype-announcer was a musician of the highest order.

Listen to The New York Giants vs The Brooklyn Dodgers at Ebbets Field, August 31st, 1951:

My last pool game.
With Melody Diachun, Kitsilano Billiards, Vancouver. December 15 2002.

[Ebbets Field and Duke Snider, unidentified photographers]

Ahhh . . . we were young.

noreply@blogger.com (Brian Nation) — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 17:02:00 +0000

This is my proudest achievement both as a photographer and as a presenter. Mary Lou Williams dwelt amongst the gods of jazz from her teenage years when she began her professional career. That would be in the nineteen-twenties. She played piano and wrote tunes and arrangements for Andy Kirk's Clouds of Joy and went on to write for and/or perform with Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Earl Hines, and others, and remained a modernist as the music evolved. In 1942 she formed a band that included Art Blakey on drums. Monk, Bud Powell, and others hung out at her Harlem apartment and revered her. As did Cecil Taylor, who came up with the idea that I should present her in concert in Vancouver and got the two of us in touch. She came and played four nights here with bassist Wyatt Ruther. She was scheduled to play with Larry Gales but just days before the gig Larry's wife dreamed he was in a plane crash and wouldn't let him travel. She aslo played a concert for kids on the Saturday afternoon, which I have on tape and will post one of these days.

I brought Mary Lou and Wyatt to the CKVU-TV studios for an interview on the "Vancouver Show" a live, two-hour nightly broadcast of local affairs. They'd play a tune, as well, and when they practiced a little before going on the air I took this picture.

So I got to hang out with a true jazz legend for four days and I confess that I regret not taking the opportunity to ask her more about the glory days of the birth of this greatest music on Earth. Frankly, I don't remember much conversation. (Fortunately, though, there is a great biography, which I highly recommend, Morning Glory: A Biography of Mary Lou Williams by Linda Dahl. Even if you have no interest in jazz history this book will fascinate you, plus the feminists among you will love it because you must realize that Williams was pretty much the only woman to make her name in the male-dominated jazz world, at least until Jane Fair came along. )

I made up for this lapse when Jay McShann came along a few years later. I had nothing to do with this gig, which was a week at the Anchor in Gastown. McShann came up around the same time as Williams, in what for me was the greatest period of jazz before the New York Fifty-Second Street bebop period of the mid-forties. Thirties Kansas City. I found out where McShann was staying and went to the hotel one day in the early afternoon. I didn't call ahead, I just took my chances. I used the hotel phone to call the desk and ask for McShann's room. He happened to be in and I just said I was no one in particular and could I just come up and hang out with him and he said sure, c'mon up and for a couple of hours we sat in his room talking about Kansas City. McShann knew Mary Lou of course. He was the first to hire Charlie Parker, as is well known. He talked about Bird, Mary Lou, Art Tatum, Basie, Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, all people he played with, hung out with, got high with, all personal pals and he loved jiust talking about all these people. It was one of the best moments of my life and maybe I should have had a tape recorder with me because I've forgotten ninety-nine percent of everything, although the one percent that's left still electrifies me.

One thing I remember best, as I was leaving I said I had one more question.

I've read a lot of history of that time in Kansas City, about, for example, how you'd play dance gigs from six at night till six in the morning and then go and jam! Mary Lou Williams mentioned how they'd bang on her window in the early morning to say the piano player was worn out and packed it in and they needed another piano player and she'd get up and go take over. Was all that really true?

Yes, it was. Yes, it was.

How could you play a twelve hour gig and keep going, playing a jam session after that???

Ahhhh . . . . we were young.

narc

noreply@blogger.com (Brian Nation) — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 04:53:00 +0000

My neighbour's a Mountie. Raymond, on the fourth floor. I run into him now and then, in the lobby or elevator and once he spotted me at the bus stop downtown and gave me a ride home. He drives a red Miata and so I cultivate his friendship in the hope that one day he'll lend me his car. The other day we were in the elevator, he was loaded down with a big jacket and a gun in its holster. Just getting off work, it looked like.

What exactly do you do?

Narcotics.

Oh shit, I whispered, backing into the corner.

I don't want to know about it.

I was kidding around, of course. I haven't indulged in illegal drugs since I got high with Sam Rivers in 1979. Even then it had been a long time and I only joined Sam because he's one of the best jazz musicians in the world and I thought if we got high together I'd learn something new but all that happened was I waited for the effects to wear off. I have no idea why I no longer enjoy what was once a favourite pastime. So much so, in fact, that I'd planned to move to North Africa because I understood that hashish was plentiful and legal. Of course, the people that told me that were very stoned, so who knows?

Hey, whatever happened to Abe Snedenko?

Who the fuck's Abe Snedenko?

Are you kidding me? You don't know about Abe Snedenko? There must be a plaque with his name hanging down at headquarters. Next time you're in the office ask one of the older guys to tell you about Abe Snedenko.

Abe Snedenko was Vancouver's number one narc in the sixties, his name synonymous with all the forces against peace, freedom, love, nudity, and addled consciousness. He was immortalized as "Sargent Stadanko" by Cheech and Chong on their 1973 smash album, Los Cochinos. Oddly enough I had to leave Vancouver to finally run into him myself. I was spending most of the summer of 1968 at Galley Bay, up the coast about 150 miles. Accessible only by boat or float plane. No roads, no powerlines, just pure natural beauty. It started out as a small commune but by the end of that summer there were, I'm guessing, close to sixty people there at one time. Most of them high most of the time.

It was a beautiful scene. Really . . . it's not just the hippie in me talking. We grew our own food, fished, and beachcombed for stray logs for the little money we needed. We cavorted au naturel amongst the trees and flowers and lay upon the rocky shore gazing out at the distant . . . etc. Of course they had to bust us.

There was a forty-foot ketch tied to the dock and sometimes I liked to sleep on it because the gentle rocking soothed me. In the morning I'd open my eyes and see the expanse of still water with the peaks snowcapped in the distance. Perfect in every way. But one night I had trouble getting to sleep because the dozen or so dogs that lived up there kept barking without letup. The were going nuts. I thought perhaps they'd cornered a bear but in any case I got up and dragged my sleeping bag back up to the big house.

Everybody had been rounded up and corralled into the main living room of the big house as five or six mounties asked stupid tough-guy questions and searched sleeping bags and backpacks for drugs. If you ever needed a picture of how utterly and irredeemably ridiculous society's reaction to the phenomenon of young people having a fun life was, this was it. Singing and guitar playing kids having a good laugh while these stern, super-serious gendarmes flashlighted their stupid way around an old ramshackle house hundreds of miles from anywhere in pursuit of nothing.

The head pig was the esteemed Abe Snedanko. After a while he rounded up his Mounties and slinked off into the night on their Mountie boat, threatening to return only next time he'd find something and throw everybody on earth under the age of 18 not wearing a suit into the clink. Now, four decades later, down on the corner from here scabrous shit-stained sleazebags hang out openly dealing not just some harmless weed, but crack cocaine, crystal meth, and worse, by the 24-hour inconvenience store.

Raymond, how come you don't bust those scumballs on the corner.

Nah . . . who gives a shit?

Man, they don't make narcs like they use to.

By the way, just to set the record straight, I'm not now nor have I ever been a "hippie". For one thing I'm too old. I came along more in the earlier "beat" timeframe when the term "hippy" was coined to describe young girls emulating the Joan Baez look who wanted to hang out and make the hipster scene. I knew many hippies, of course, and whenever possible enjoyed the liberated lusts of their females, although not as often as I'd have liked or as I imagined, but often enough. Amen.

who needs enemies?

noreply@blogger.com (Brian Nation) — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 05:46:00 +0000

Had coffee with Bowering again today. Who should walk in but Alex Waterhouse-Hayward. Alex is one of the best photographers west of Vermont, in my opinion. At least I thought he was before we had a falling-out last year. Over what I will only tell you privately because this is if nothing else a good vibes collection of memoirs and anecdotes. He stopped to say hello in spite of a big rush to get to the photography class he teaches up the street. Are we still friends I asked him and he nodded yes. Hey, is that your camera in that bag? Take our picture. No, he said. Then he must have seen something . . . I don't know, but he fumbled with his huge what was it, I forget, but a very large camera to which he attached a Polaroid back and took this picture, presenting the print straight away. There were tables everywhere and he couldn't seem to get back far enough to focus the image but who cares, I think this is a great photo I treasure already.

Just to show Alex there are no hard feelings I'll direct you to his blog, although there may be new hard feelings when he sees I've posted his photo without any consultation. Regardless, have a look at http://alexwaterhousehayward.com/blog/blog.html

Alex at the SP Gallery 2002.

Electric Nightmare Jelly

noreply@blogger.com (Brian Nation) — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 08:26:00 +0000

You don't hear much about ESP these days.

My room was in the basement. This is the same room I gave up for a night so the Grateful Dead could crash there. Larry F and I had this routine where we'd go down there in the evening, smoke about six pounds of hash, and improvise on two electric guitars for a couple of hours. Neither of us could play in the traditional sense of “play”. We'd just plug 'em in and produce sounds, noises, effects, rhythms, snatches of melody, etc., and one time Mort told us he could hear us from the floor above and we sounded incredible and should start a band called Electric Nightmare Jelly. We were ahead of our time for sure and had we made tapes, and kept at it till today, we'd have a hip cult following, be poor but revered.

No plan. No talk. Just closed our eyes and went at it. The music was consuming, we were in another world of pure sound and nothing else but the usual hallucinogenic light-show. Like when you're very tired and rub your eyes real hard. Like roadrunner cartoons on the inside of your eyelids, a circus of strange happy beasts, wild horseback freeflight on the far side of the moon, a Macy's parade of hieroglyph balloons floating in your hair, all your childhood friends dancing on the head of Zsa Zsa Gabor in a red room filled with helium. Suddenly I saw something so intense and real I had to stop. All it was, was three orange 5's inside each other on a blue field. Larry stopped, opened his eyes and looked at me, wondering why I stopped. I knew he'd seen it, too.

What number? I asked.

Huh?

What number?

He thought a second and said, Five. Three 5's. Orange on a blue background.

Three years later I saw this in an art magazine:

I have no explanation for any of this.

Charles Demuth painted The Figure 5 in Gold in 1928, inspired by the poem, The Great Figure, by William Carlos Williams, published in 1921.

The Great Figure

Among the rain
and lights
I saw the figure 5
in gold
on a red
fire truck
moving
tense
unheeded
to gong clangs
siren howls
and wheels rumbling
through the dark city

William Carlos Williams, Autobiography, New Directions, NY, 1967, p. 172:
Once on a hot July day coming back exhausted from the Post Graduate Clinic, I dropped in as I sometimes did at Marsden [Hartley]'s studio on Fifteenth Street for a talk, a little drink maybe and to see what he was doing. As I approached his number I heard a great clatter of bells and the roar of a fire engine passing the end of the street down Ninth Avenue. I turned just in time to see a golden figure 5 on a red background flash by. The impression was so sudden and forceful that I took a piece of paper out of my pocket and wrote a short poem about it.

Here's my photo of Larry (with Bonnie) taken around the time of our musical collaborations:

I hadn't seen Larry for thirty years when in 1994 he marched past me in the Quadra Island May Day Parade. I was at the side of the road when I spotted him and called him over. We talked for a few minutes and I took his picture. We planned to meet at the end of the parade in the park where the May Day celebrations take place. The park isn't that big. There were maybe 300 people there. I never saw him again.

do the right thing

noreply@blogger.com (Brian Nation) — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 08:36:00 +0000

The current issue of BC Bookworld reprints an article by Pierre Coupey on the origins of the Georgia Straight and Dan McLeod's rise to power. The story first ran in The Grape in 1972. That was the short-lived weekly put out by some of the Straight's staff - the result of their failed attempt to persuade Dan to relinquish what some considered his illegitimate ownership of the Straight to them. I was on the staff at the time. I backed Dan, contradicting my own convictions and confounding everyone including myself.

I remember well my first meeting with Dan because unlike most people in my circle of hipsters and flipsters he was dolled up in a suit and tie, blonde hair cut short in the style of some kind of youth for jesus canvasser, but we clicked anyway. Dan has a sense of humour and that makes up for almost anything. I'd just returned to Vancouver after spending the summer a year or two before, during the UBC poetry conference. I went by Peter Auxier's place at Seventh and Oak and that's where I met Dan. He was in the UBC math department but was also coeditor, with Auxier, of the legendary TISH poetry newsletter. We hung out a bit and as we were both night-dwellers there were many 3 or 4 AM meetings at the Jolly Roger around the corner from my place at 2nd and Cypress, sometimes with George Bowering. Eventually we shared an apartment in the building at 1666 West Sixth Avenue.

In the fall of 1966 I hitchhiked back to Montreal. I asked Dan to look after my record collection till I got settled, when he could ship them to me. Months later, when two or three increasingly frustrated and angry letters asking for my albums went unanswered I finally phoned him - a big step in those days before cheap rates. Dan said he and some others were starting up an underground paper. He asked me to be their Montreal correspondent. “Yeah, maybe. What about my records?” Dan probably sent them the very day in September 1967 that I took the train west, because when I got back to Vancouver they were in Montreal and the Georgia Straight was a reality, with a couple of issues out, stirring up some shit.

I went by the house at 16th and Burrard where Dan and his cohorts were living and publishing the paper. It was a pretty spunky little rag and I never missed an issue but I was not involved with it in any way till 1970. By then they were in an office in Gastown and Dan was the boss.

In 1970 I got my dad to cosign a bank loan for me so I could buy a truck. I got the idea from a junkie friend of mine that with a truck of some sort there were always ways to earn a few bucks. I bought a 57 VW van for about 400 dollars. I didn't want a real truck because that might have led to real work. Light deliveries and small moving jobs was more what I had in mind. I called Dan to see if he needed anyone to deliver papers around town. He did and I started right in. It was a pretty good job. One day a week. Two days when the dailies went on strike. Eventually I was some kind of distribution manager. Besides the Straight, we flogged all kinds of underground papers from various cities, as well as a few odd books, underground comix, and whatnot. (For a number of years “distribution” was my racket, even after leaving the Straight. I did pretty well at it so, naturally, gave it up.)

I did some writing for the paper, too. Mostly on jazz topics. Meanwhile, there were staff meetings to try negotiating a deal with Dan whereby he'd hand over ownership of the paper to the collective. A few of us stood by Dan. I thought I was being realistic, or practical, or some damn thing. It seemed as though Dan worked some kind of capitalist magic to keep the paper going week after week, juggling creditors, and writing cheques to the printer (for example) to get the paper out and then frantically finding money to cover the cheques. That kind of thing. I had no faith in the collective to keep it together in the long run. Funny . . . I don't know now why I thought that. Also, there were some political elements that bugged me. I submitted a story once (the paper ran fiction sometimes) in which a cow was a prominent character. The women's faction thought the cow represented women (it didn't) and was therefore sexist. They refused to publish it. (Editorial decisions were made by the staff, for the most part.) That didn't win me over. But for the most part I thought it was a good paper which stood for good things.

When the insurgents seized the office, Dan, myself, and a handful of others kept the paper going out of Mitzi Gibbs' living room. Besides my regular delivery duties I was running around drumming up content, taking pictures, writing stories, helping with layout, etc., and although I still earned my commissions there wasn't any question about getting paid for any of that work and why I was doing this for what was ultimately Dan McLeod's business is a question I've only started asking myself recently. But the bigger question, beyond anything that was in it for me, is, was I on the wrong side?

A person wiser than myself (Barbara) said something to me a long time ago that seems fairly simple and yet manages to elude everyone. An improved golden rule. Have principles, and live by them.

In other words, do the right thing.

LINKS:

Pierre Coupey's article can be found on Rick McGrath's web site. Go here and look in the right hand column for: Straight Beginnings: The Rise & Fall Of the Underground Press. The Origins Of The Georgia Straight And The November 1967 Split by Pierre Coupey

A reasonable bio of Dan McLeod with some Straight history is at the BC Bookword's Author Bank.

Men of Destiny

noreply@blogger.com (Brian Nation) — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 03:52:00 +0000

I got this at Classic Books on St Catherine Street in 1961. I read it during breaks at my job at Chevalier Associates, about which I will have more to say in a later episode. Soon after reading the book I attended a lecture by Otto Nathan, Einstein’s closest friend and his literary executor, on the subject of Einstein, the atom bomb, and pacifism. It was there I first met anarcho/pacifist Dimitrios Roussopoulos and where I spent a dollar on a Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament button, usually referred to nowadays as a "peace button".

I know there are some among you who picture those who demonstrated against nuclear testing and the arms race as a knee-jerk cabal of commies and peaceniks, or worse, but at least in my case, and probably everyone's case, it was reading books like Russell's and attending lectures and meetings and a lot of thought and consideration that led to the inescapable conviction that we had to do this, we had no choice. We were scared out of our wits – some of us still are. And wearing that button took some nerve, too. This was not long after the McCarthy era, don't forget. I wore that button knowing I'd be defending it, and myself, constantly. The point was to engage friends and strangers in conversation and persuade them to help stop the atomic madness. Despite my best efforts, however, the hydrogen jukebox rocks on, doom still dangles over our thin skulls suspended by a fragile thread, and lunatics still rule the world.

I participated in marches and demonstrations for nuclear disarmament. After my first march a large group of us convened at Dick Clements' apartment on MacKay Street. That’s when I first met Dick, who was a prime instigator of pacifist and anti-nuclear activities. Within weeks he cracked up and was incarcerated at the Allen Memorial Hospital in Verdun where mad scientist Dr. Ewan Cameron conducted CIA-funded experiments on Dick and others, involving shock treatments, LSD, sleep deprivation, and general psychic torture that permanently fucked up the lives and brains of his “patients”.

A year or two later I ran into Clements, on a day pass from the Allen, at Peace House. We went to a tavern on Sherbrooke Street where we drank beer and Dick described the horrors of his confinement. "I gotta get outta there." I said he could move into my place and a week later he arrived with many cartons of books and an AM radio.

When we weren't drinking or getting high, Dick lay on his mat in the room lined with his books listening to the latest AM pop music (which I eventually developed a taste for myself, at least for the time I knew him) and reading nonstop – science, philosophy, mysticism, economics, politics, phenomenology, shamanism, magic, alchemy, mysteries, etc. He once said his IQ was about 180 and it might have been more than that. He was the most brilliant fuckup I've ever known. For seven or eight years he was the best friend I had and I felt we communicated on many levels in ways that were mysterious to all others, including Catherine, the woman he eventually married.

Our alliance continued through various moves east and west . . . we wound up in Vancouver and at the end of the decade there was a betrayal that pretty much ended our friendship. I won't say what this betrayal consisted of till all relevant parties, including myself, are dead.

Dick created for himself a persona named P. X. Belinsky. A book of P. X. Belinsky's poems was published by bill bissett's blewointment press but mainly he wrote long letters to the editor and I suspect there were essays, treatises, and diatribes unpublished and unseen by anyone. But he was most famous for showing up drunk and disrupting political meetings and literary gatherings. He made some enemies this way. He had so many friends that he probably needed a few enemies. I don't think there was anyone he ever met upon who he didn't make an everlasting impression. He was utterly brilliant and completely mad and, when drunk, a consummate asshole. He was hospitalized a few times and drank remorselessly, exploding in fits of rage now and then. He wound up with three or four kids by at least two women. The first of these was a boy with whom I was very close in his first years but now seems to want nothing to do with me. I'm not sure why. From 1970 onwards Dick and I had little to do with each other. I was never able to forgive or forget the betrayal I referred to and as we'd been impossibly close friends before that I sometimes wonder if I had gotten past these events if it would not have saved him somehow. Saved him from what, or for what, I don't know.

The little I remember of the little I knew goes like this . . . recuperating from a hernia operation, an infection flares up and, living alone, no phone, he dies. Summer of 2003.

There are some photos of his memorial gathering here.

Belinsky's Postcard
Little known piece of Vancouver cultural history. Having inherited about 4500 dollars, around 1966, Dick decides to open a bookshop. A store on Tenth Avenue, south side of the street just a few doors west of the corner of Alma goes out of business. The Advance Mattress Company. A group of leftist UBC students leases the space for a radical coffee house, changes "mpany" on the window to "ffee House" to create the short-lived but notorious Advance Mattress Coffee House. Dick, or PX, rents half the space for his bookshop, "Belinky's Postcard", and he and I take the bus up there every day for a couple of weeks to paint, build shelves, etc. Before a single book enters the store we run out of steam, or money, or sanity, and that was the end of that. So there was no bookshop but this may be an interesting little anecdote nonetheless.

Howie Schulman

noreply@blogger.com (Brian Nation) — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 04:42:00 +0000

In the weeks before heading to Cuba I regularly stopped by the Fair Play for Cuba Committee offices – just to hang out and chat about Cuban and other revolutionary matters with a guy from Texas whose name escapes me now and who was in charge of things in the absence of Richard Gibson who I believe was an FPCC founder and ran the main New York branch. I'd pick up books or pamphlets and gossip with others that came by. On the day that I discovered that New Directions publishers were in the same building I got off at their floor and stared at the lettering on the frosted glass window for a minute or so, then got back on the elevator – I had nothing to publish yet. During another visit I met a girl who invited me to stay at her place and when I hooked up later that day with Murray and a friend of his in Times Square, Murray’s friend warned me that New York was full of crazed chicks that invited young guys like me home and whacked their penises off with a butcher knife in the middle of the night. He was neither the first nor the last of the guys I’d meet in my life that seemed to enjoy scaring the shit out of you with their insane beliefs for no good reason. I confess I was a little nervous later that night when I went to the address she’d given me on the Lower East Side but the worst she did was make me a great-tasting cup of coffee.

It was at the FPCC that I met Howard Schulman. Howie was a few years older than me, had an exhilarating energy and enthusiasm for poetry and revolution and I thought I’d met my own personal Neal Cassady character. Howie edited the magazine Pa’lante, put out by the League of Militant Poets. He asked me to take a stack with me to Cuba. “Hand them out to anyone you want but give at least half of them to Maria Rosa Almendros, a great woman -- you must meet her!” The cover was a black and white photo of some anonymous pistol-packing hombre and inside were writings by Cubans and Americans, including Ginsberg, Leroi Jones, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, and other hip radicals. (This was the only issue of Pa’lante to see the light of day.)

One night walking around somewhere in the East Village, Howie and I, we were discussing poetry, specifically the so-called new american poets and Howie asked if I was a poet. I said I was. “Who do you want to meet? I can introduce you to anyone – I know all the poets. How about Paul Blackburn? He lives just over in the next block.” We walked the block and from the middle of the street Howie hollered at the sky, “Blackburn! Hey, Blackburn!” It was a six-story walkup, no intercom, and that’s how you did it. Blackburn was one of the poet luminaries I knew from the magazines and anthologies and it was like Howie, my personal guide, was calling up to the poet gods in heaven so that I could myself be admitted there.

Blackburn’s studio was all white with crammed bookcases and a desk that ran the length of one wall and made an ell down the other and was piled high with papers, manuscripts, books, scribblers, and paperback volumes in the centre of which was his typewriter. This is where poetry got made. Blackburn told me about the Tuesday night open readings at the Deux Magots. I went every Tuesday after that and it was there I discovered poet and underground film legend, Taylor Mead, star of The Queen of Sheba Meets the Atom Man, and other essential cinema classics.

I'd go up to Times Square and meet Howie in cafeterias around the corner from the office in which he from time to time worked at a business I believe owned by his uncle. He proved to be a great inspiration for me because he never doubted my poetic gifts even though I had none. And his high spirits and love of everyone on the scene was infectious. In spite of haphazard efforts on my part to write anything remotely interesting or beautiful, in his presence there was no room for doubt and eventually the great cop-out that sustained me into the future, that I could live like a poet even if I was incapable of writing or understanding anything, served me well thanks to his inspired if misplaced confidence. (If this makes no sense to you then you know how I feel!)

A month later, after the Howard Schulman, Paul Blackburn, Lower East Side butcher knife wielding sex criminal days I was in Havana, taking the bus from the Hotel Riviera to the Casa de las Americas to meet Maria Rosa Almendros and give her a stack of Pa'Lantes. And when I got back to New York a month after that with all my luggage and camera and film and cigars and everything else I had with me stolen by the Yankee pigs somewhere between Miami and New York it was Howie who dragged me around to the Canadian Consulate and U.S. Department of Something-or-Other to demand explanations and the return of these confiscated goods - to no avail but he tried, he was furious whereas all I did was shrug and stare dumbly North at Canada to where I eventually returned.

If I had taken a picture of Howie I could have shown it to you now, but it would have been stolen with everything else and exists perhaps in a file cabinet hidden somewhere under the labyrinthine imperialist cesspool of america. So all I have are some vague and some vivid memories and a face I can't even recall.

Less than a year before he himself passed on Allen Ginsberg, in reply to my query as to the whereabouts of Howie Schulman informed that he'd died sometime before that. So that's my Howie Schulman story.

blood of a poet

noreply@blogger.com (Brian Nation) — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 05:45:00 +0000

Wednesday, two days ago, marked the 50th anniversary of the publication of On the Road. A few weeks earlier I'd ordered the newly published original unedited scroll version of On the Road, which I'd hoped to have something to say about on Wednesday but, alas, it still hasn't arrived. About 47 years ago I read the Signet pocketbook Road and a few weeks later ordered the hardcover edition from Rodick's on Ste Catherine Street. It cost me about $2 and I still have it and have read it about three times. Every time I wonder if it stands the test of time and it does, and then some.

Today I had coffee with Renee, on the beach two blocks from my home. I've known Renee almost as long as I've known this book. Renee and I were part of a gang of four that also included Murray and Debby, that hung out in the cafes of Stanley Street, the Potpourri bookstore, and the Sir George Williams College film club.

Debby was pretty much my first insane love mania. But I was so bashful and insecure, and she so seemingly uninterested in me, that all that ever came of it was a goodbye kiss when I moved to New York. Debby so loved romance and melodrama that after I was gone she spoke of me as her departed lover. I guess she liked me better that way. (The handful of poems I wrote and gave her one day in the back room of the Potpourri really helped.)

Renee and Debby were pals and today, when I told Renee about the one letter I got from Debby she said I ought to write the story. There's not a whole lot to it but here goes.

I stayed at my Uncle's on West 96th Street before getting my own apartment on the Lower East Side where day and night I longed for Debby. One day my uncle called to say there was a letter for me. It was from her. I thought I'd died and gone to heaven and was reborn and died again. Every atom of my being buzzed in hope and anticipation and fear. Although I wasn't aware of it then I know now that the yearning and craziness was more painfully thrilling than love itself could ever be. I was so intoxicated and frightened that although I left for his place immediately to get the letter, I made it take as long as I possibly could. I could have been there in twenty minutes on the subway but walked instead, something like 100 blocks from East 6th and Avenue D to West 96th and Amsterdam. It took most of the day. When I got there I was invited to have dinner and I put off opening the letter. When I left I got the subway continuing uptown to the Columbia University campus where I'd already planned to see Cocteau's The Blood of a Poet. I walked around the campus looking for the perfect poetic spot and eventually found a concrete pedestal under an oak tree. I sat and studied the envelope, waiting for the light to fall on it in just a certain way, or some damn thing, heart pounding in my chest.

Eventually I got out my penknife and slit open the envelope, extracted the single page folded in quarters. The entire edge had been singed, with a cigarette or something. To denote what, I didn't exactly know. I read the thing finally. I didn't then, and still don't now have any idea what it said. It was utterly baffling and ambiguous but the one thing I know it didn't say was come home I love you and want to be with you for now and ever. Or anything concrete whatsoever. I was clueless and thought, if this is what and how women will communicate with me I am lost forever and might as well resign myself to a solitary loveless life.

I did eventually see her again, twenty or more years later. She remembered nothing about the letter but quoted, verbatim, whole verses from the batch of poems I'd given her all those years before.

John Sinclair

noreply@blogger.com (Brian Nation) — Fri, 07 Sep 2007 04:35:00 +0000

I'm still waiting for a reply to the letter I wrote John Sinclair ten years ago. Sunday, July 13, 1997. Late Saturday night – around 1:30 AM which makes it Sunday – I heard his voice for the first time in thirty-three years, hosting a blues show coming in via the internet from radio station WWOZ, New Orleans. I looked up the station phone number, dialed it, and chatted with John for about half an hour during which time he never did remember who I was. Not surprising. It was a long time ago and no doubt he's met a lot of people since then. Later that day I wrote the letter, hoping to jog his memory and also to inquire as to the fate of others in the John Sinclair circle of which for a brief time I was a part.

Detroit was never a place I'd expected to visit. But you know me – never pass up a free ride. I'd been in Toronto about a week or two, staying with Victor and Elizabeth Coleman. Victor and Tom Jackrell had been invited to read their poetry at the Detroit Artists Workshop and I tagged along just for laughs. I was trying to get to Vancouver anyway and Detroit seemed to me to be in the right direction. I guess it's about a five hour drive from Toronto. By the time we arrived and the boys read their poems the next day and packed up and went home I'd decided to stick around.

I remember two communal houses – one at 4825 John Lodge and another around the corner at 1252 West Forest. There may have been others. I'm guessing now that there were about a dozen or more artists, poets, and musicians, etc., living and working there. In the house on Forest the living/dining area had been converted into a performance space for readings and jazz concerts. There were others who didn't live there but were regular participants in the overflowing of non-stop creative ferment. John Sinclair may not have been the main man – it was a collective – but he did seem to be a spiritual and political ringleader of some sort. He had great energy, political smarts, he inspired everybody, and on top of that was one of the nicest guys I had the good fortune to meet in my life.

I slept on a cot in the basement, in a room right next to Sinclair's. He was away much of the time and invited me to make free use of the desk in his room, the typewriter, and the bottle of bennies in the right-hand drawer, which I put to good use. That got me started on my one and only attempt at a novel, Hair, abandoned when I left Detroit. That's right, Hair. I beat the famous proto-hippie Broadway Hair by about a year. Entirely different story but I own that title. It was undoubtedly crap anyway, extremely influenced by Terry Southern and William Burroughs – but who knows? – maybe it was brilliant. I read some chapters at one of the Sunday afternoon public readings, on a double bill with the ingeniously funny and tragic Bill Hutton who later published two books and then vanished, apparently a suicide.

The weekly jazz sessions were led by the great Charles Moore on trumpet and flugelhorn and included John Dana, Ron English, Lyman Woodard and others who fell by on occasion to sit in, most notably a young student from Ann Arbor who's piano playing startled everyone with its advanced brilliance. This was Stanley Cowell, whom you should all know by now. Jim Semark gave little illuminating musical talks. He worked for Motown Records but his musical knowledge was pretty broad. One evening he gave a little talk on Debussy. Martine Algier conducted life art classes during which I doodled nonsensically on sheets of foolscap just so I could look at her. (A year or two later we became friends in San Francisco where she wound up after hiking the Oregon mountains with Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg. She was Snyder's girlfriend for a time and it was Allen who gave me her address on Downey Street and told me to visit her. A couple of years ago we reconnected via email.)

But back in Detroit, some of those I spent time with and remember are Jerry Younkins, George Tysh, Robin Eichle, and Judy Warner. George and I especially hung out some and I had dinner at his parents place a couple of times. Meanwhile I was taking Sinclair's bennies and writing crazy shit. I got occasional day-jobs through the Manpower daylabour office, something I did in other cities, as well, to get a few bucks here and there. One day on the bus home from a job at an auto parts factory I spotted a movie theatre marquee advertising a stage show in addition to whatever movie was playing so I hopped off the bus and paid two bucks to check it out. Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Martha and the Vandellas, Gladys Knight and the Pips, a couple others I forgot, plus topping the bill, The Temptations! All that and a movie for two bucks and if you stuck around you got to see the whole thing again. That theatre was rockin'. Kids danced in the aisles, in their seats, danced all over.

Sinclair was writing poems, essays, manifestos, liner notes. Of all persons and events in Detroit, John Sinclair stands out for me as a personal hero in the long march towards a future of Art and Freedom that has yet to materialize. He was open and welcoming to everyone, including a couple of guys to whom he offered two joints for which they busted him. He was sentenced to ten years hard time. You might have heard about this. None less than John Lennon wrote and recorded the song "John Sinclair" which may have had some effect in reducing the sentence, despite not being one of Lennon's better efforts, in my opinion. John was freed after 29 months.

The movie TWENTY TO LIFE: The Life & Times of John Sinclair, a film by Steve Gebhardt, premieres in Italy today.

Philip K. Dick, Volume II

noreply@blogger.com (Brian Nation) — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 05:24:00 +0000

The Library of America, "dedicated to publishing, and keeping in print, authoritative editions of America's best and most significant writing" has put out their deluxe Dick volume. The current New Yorker has a review of the book by Adam Gopnick. The New York Times review of a couple of months ago is here.

My prediction of forty years ago that Dick would become the object of a cult of readers and that eventually mainstream culture mavens would have no choice but to acknowledge his sur-genius has long since come to pass. Witness the number of Hollywood renditions of his work, pretty much all bogus, with the possible exception of Blade Runner which although as inaccurate as the others is at least true to the spirit of Dick's insane but entirely on-the-money vision of things as they really are, or might be. (An interesting essay on Dick and the movies, from a Wired Magazine of four years ago is here.) During the brief time that I knew Dick in the early seventies I could have obtained movie rights for all his novels in exchange for some women's phone numbers but, alas, it was one of many missed opportunities in my life to strike it rich.

Above is a photo of my shelf of Dick novels. (Click on it to see the full-sized image.) It's probably not all of them because I have a habit of misplacing things. But it's most of them and I'm guessing that the collection would be worth about a hundred grand now except that they were all read many, many times and are therefore in pretty bad shape.

As a matter of fact I know some are missing because where's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? And of four autographed copies (add another million to the value of each of those) I can only find three.

How these came to be signed is slightly amusing. Dick knocked on my door one night. He was with a very attractive young woman who it turns out he'd just met in a bar. She wouldn't believe he was a published and somewhat famous author. He'd seen my collection of his books so brought her over to see them and borrow a few she could read. I said yeah sure, and he chose four. (It would be interesting to know which four but that was too long ago.) I said, you can have those four if you sign four others. I should have had him sign them all. Of course there were too many but while he was busy signing books I could have made out with his chick maybe.

A previous Dick tale is here.

Tomorrow, my other favourite author, Jack Kerouac, hits the big time.

now we're getting somewhere

noreply@blogger.com (Brian Nation) — Sat, 18 Aug 2007 22:28:00 +0000

This is a more recent shot of the same location pictured in my previous article. It was posted today by David Saxe in his photoblog.

Saxe, whom I've known longer than just about anyone still living on this planet, has hardly been mentioned in these pages. That's partly due to the fact that I know he's a regular reader here and so I hesitate to embarrass the fellow.

We were in the same eighth grade class at West Hill but I barely knew him then. Marvin Minkoff whispered to me once that David's brother was a "beatnik" and that was good enough for me. Henry's an artist and that alone made him a beatnik in Minkoff's view. Minkoff once spotted me walking home home with a jazz record in hand (Jazz in Transition, a rare item these days) and that made me a beatnik, too, so there ya go.

I'm not sure what happened between eighth grade (I quit school the following year so that I could get on with my real life) and the Guilbault Street days by which time we were hanging out on a regular basis, listening to and exchanging jazz records, drinking beer nightly at the Swiss Hut, smoking weed, etc. Saxe was studying at the École des Beaux-Arts and was never without his Rapidograph, drawing endlessly on everything and his talent was impressive, to say the least. Eventually he was also carrying a camera around and was already a better photographer than I would ever be, so it's not surprising he's now one of the best and most interesting photographers on the planet.

Speaking of the Internet, I have to say that amongst its many miracles it is wholly responsible for David and I continuing our friendship after all these years. Without it we'd see each other once a decade and perhaps exchange a letter or two in alternate centuries. But in 1992 he was the only person aside from myself with an email address and so we began a correspondence that continues to this day and now comprises over 20,000 pages of text which elucidates the entire history of the second half of the twentieth century. At least as it applied to us.

David is a few months older than and an thus I regard him as a mentor and role model. He's not only a better photographer and visual artist in general, he's the world's foremost crank. Next to him I'm Doris Day.

David Saxe's photoblog is here. And more photos in his web gallery here.