A note to Andrei Codrescu on the launch of his Plague Diaries

Well Andrei, it’s good to see you’re alive. After all these years. Last time I heard from you was in a blanket cc email asking  me whether or not I was dead or alive. Afraid of the outcome, like Schrodinger’s cat, I didn’t know whether to answer it, or to not answer it. Rest assured, I didn’t take it personally. After all it was addressed—or was it undressed—to practically everybody else in Sonoma County. Is you in or is you out?

Yes, I’m delighted to say we’re all still alive and kicking. Gail King and Pat Nolan are on Facebook. Well, Gail is. You know how Pat. Jeffrey Miller is still dead. Hunce Voelcker, too. I wonder if his Brooklyn Bridge castle still stands in the deepwoods of Monte Rio?

I finally got around to scanning my old slides if it. All this free time. If you want to see them, give a shout. It’s fairly quiet in this neck of the woods. No one is out and about, it’s like a rollback in time to the 1960s sans logging trucks. The Summer of Love hasn’t yet happened. We’re all honing our backwoods skills. Victory gardens and foraging. Everybody’s baking bread. We’re all getting fat. And we howl nightly with the neighbors. Lately the coyotes have taken to joining us.

Glad to see you’re here. As you know, there is no there there. On some level, via group memory, we never quite let go of you and your stories. And you’ve no idea who is am, I was one of the young poets taking sprout in poetry’s garden. You are still part of the strange Ur text of our lives. And we’re delighted that you are in fine fettle too. You’re looking good. What a long strange trip it’s been. Carry on.

Bliss Buys Cochran saw my note and wrote: I'm also glad you're still around, Andrei. You probably don't even remember me, but maybe you remember the Sonoma County Stump, where Mo and I both worked. I believe you submitted some articles (a column?), it's been 50 years so forgive me if my memory's vague. I look forward to your Plague Diary and I hope you'll be safe in the epicenter. Tried to friend you, but FB says you already have too many friends—5,000!...never knew they could put a limit on your friends. Wonder if THEY'RE all still around.

I told Bliss that I posted her note to Andrei Codrescu. If you go to his author page you can like it and then leave a message there directly if you would like.

Andrei wrote back: Wow! What a blast from the past. Not quite sure who’s who but I’ve been in touch with Pat. I love his Lufe of Crine, his novels and blog. I’m back in New York after 50 years or do... living in Brooklyn. It’s like I left 10 mins ago — a huge demonstration just went past toward the Brooklyn Bridge, probably about to meet thousands in the other side in the old rad Lower East Side.
I have occasional bouts of nostalgia about Monte Rio but too busy to indulge it. I post 3x/a week a video Plague Journal at codrescu.com/my-news. If you want to see it on FB it’s at the Andrei Codrescu Here page. I wonder what Jeff would have thought about the internet, but he’d have recognized all this, it’s just crazy continued. I like your memoir and yes, I’d love to see those pics. Maybe send by We Share or Mail Drop?
Stay sane compadres, love,
Andrei

I said, Andrei,  Bliss Buys and Joe Leary ran the Sonoma County Stump, I was photographer and poetry editor, probably how I met Pat. But then I began to cut my poetic teeth by organizing readings at the Cotati Cabaret, and Sonoma State, circa 1979. I think you were long gone by then. But the stories of you survived. You were the grand poet in absentía at our gatherings. 

I remember when the Jeffrey Miller’s posthumous book came out, we read his poems from inside a redwood tree. Drinking may have been involved. But Marianne Ware was always championing your stories. You could hardly forget Marianne, Jewish mama as wide as she was tall, and a generous soul to go with it. If we ever get out of this alive, I will start scanning those photos very soon.

• A note to Andrei Codrescu on Life of Crime

Remembering John Prine's Brother at Garbo's

Chicago Sun Times columnist and movie critic, Roger Ebert, wrote "John Prine is the poet of my life. People say he's great, but he's a lot better than that." I recommend reading Roger Ebert's Journal, a column he originally wrote in 1970, "John Prine: American Legend—A Singing Mailman Who Delivers a Powerful Message in a Few Words."

(Ebert's also updated the original story by posting some great John Prine YouTube links. The " Angel From Montgomery" backstory is worth the price of admission.) Bob Dylan once said "Prine's stuff is pure Proustian existentialism." I concur.

I have an interesting John Prine segue too via his brother. Circa 1980, John Prine's brother played John's songs for drinks at our Russian River Writers' Guild Monday Nite Poetry & Prose Reading series at Garbo's bar in Guernewood Park, CA. That's how I first learned to really listen to the words of John Prine's songs as poetry.

Ironically, it was songs—Irish ballads that first led me to writing. But that's another story. Prine always had such good angst-riddled lines: "You've broken the speed of the sound of loneliness...How can you ask about tomorrow?" My kind of lines. I was living in a perpetually warped möbius strip time.

(In the 1980s, we were living under a dark cloud: many of the gay club owners who housed our poetry venues were succumbing to a mysterious disease. Nobody knew what it was. Or its name. But we personally knew the names of the fallen: Peter Pender, the pianist/gold medal figure skater, bridge/chess champ who owned Fife's Resort with partner Hugh Ross, Stumptown Annie's owner, decorated Vietnam Purple Heart veteran, Leonard Matlovich, the first gay man to "come out" while in the military—was no longer looking like Kevin Spacey. It was too much to bear.

There was also my neighbor, handsome Bill Dutra, the original Marlboro Man, his beautiful face ravaged... Note Bene: I can't find info on Bill on the internet but he may have been Christian Haren. The info on Christian (or Chuck) fits—he owned The Chocolate Factory in Guerneville. But I can't find a photo.

Bill showed me an old tear sheet photo of him as the Marlboro Man—which I recognized. Bill told us amazing stories of being an actor, working with John Wayne—how I found out Dr. Kildare was gay—and stories of Key West. So all the pieces fit—just not the name of the Castro Street Cowboy.

I could have confabulated the name—but I've an uncanny memory for details. Whoa! Now I've segued so far from my story, I'm even scaring myself. So sorry. Another story, another time. (The Russian River basin attracted many Hollywood types, Fred MacMurray, Raymond Burr, Irene Dailey all lived in its watershed.)

My personal John Prine favorites were the songs that had recently made the charts. I loved "Paradise," but we all called it " Daddy Won'tcha Take me Back to Muhlenberg County," a song Prine says he wrote for his father. There's some good backstory video on the song here.

When I was a senior in high school in 1969, the town of Paradise, in Muhlenburg County, was drowned by the floodwaters of the Green River when a dam was erected, so barges could get to the Peabody coal fields. All about progress.

Scanning B&W negatives

At long last, I am able to begin scanning my B&W negatives from the 1980s. I just rescued my negatives from cold storage, and my first scans were of Bob Kaufman at the Black Bart poetry reading in San Francisco, May, 1983. Pat Nolan and Alastair Johnston of Poltroon Press in Berkeley, plan to scan all the old Black Bart Life of Crime newsletters and turn it into a book. Which led me to the negative resurrection thing. 

I honestly thought I wouldn't be able to find the Black Bart contact sheet and negatives, as most of my poet negatives had a slight mishap at a really good party (people wanted to see my photos so I brought my binder with contact sheets and negs—mistake). Later on in the evening, my negative binders met up with an overturned carton of half and half—which led to late night washing of thousands of negatives and separation from their contact sheets. A logistic nightmare.

Migod do I ever have photos of dead poets....Brodsky, cold fish that he was, was right on top of the pile. And all the kazillions of Poetry International poets I documented over the years. Hugo Klaus, Bert Schierrbeck. All the late great Dutch & Belgish poets. Bert's funeral was a veritable who's who of the poetry world. The UK Adrians of Yellow Submarine fame....so easy to get distracted.

But scanning on a borrowed Nikon Coolpix L1000 has its' crankies. For starters, it's SCSI. That means I have to use a G4 and boot in OS 9 as there hasn't been any SCSI support for 15 years.

Most of the time the scanner won't show up for work. Restarting the Mac usually doesn't resolve the problem, But it's my only hope. My last and best hope. Oh, how I do love that three chord Mac cresendo: BOOOOONNNNG. Over and over and over again until I wish for the solitude of Zyzzyx Road in the Mojave Desert. So when I do get the scanner up and working, it's an all day and into the night marathon....

The first photos I posted to this blog were of Padraigín MacGuillicuddy (see Nov-Dec 2008). I was wanting photos of her as I'd posted a first draft of my story on her... Maybe someday, I'll find the final version of her story among clippings. (Another waiting in the wings project. Where, exactly, does the time go?)

Her daughter found my blog and wrote to me.. .she was going to send photos as was Sean Folsom, but nada. I'm glad to say that if you'd like to see that classy lady, the photos are up. I didn't realize how drop-dead gorgeous she was...very Maureen O'Hara.

I may post a few of the Black Bart photos here as well as a sneak preview—just because I can (besides, I suspect that the photos will be printed old school—read tamizdat—so very Cold War)... and Bobby Kaufman, the father of all Beatniks (tho Herb Caen is credited with coining the word Beatnik, a dirty word in both the USA and the USSR, Herb heard it first from Bobby's lips before immortalizing it in print.) I'm so jazzed. Can you dig it, baby?

Hart Crane's 101th Birthday Party

The Paper was first launched in 1979 by Elizabeth Poole and Nick Valentine, in Guernewood Park, and Monte Rio. I began working for The Paper around 1980.  Somewhere along the way, it became the West Sonoma County Paper. Nick Valentine or John Boland may have changed the name again. John moved it from Monte RIo to Forestville to Freestone and to Santa Rosa. When it was purchased in 1994 by Silicon Valley-based Metro Newspapers Group (a chain of 10 weeklies: AAN members Metro Silicon Valley and Metro Santa Cruz), it became the Sonoma County Independent. The Sonoma County Independent morphed into the Northern California Bohemian in 2000. I use the same name throughout, though I worked for at least three iterations of the paper.

Harte Crane’s birthday party photo

Blast from the past: Hunce Voelcker's annual Hart Crane party: Ann Erickson, Betty Garrett, Gail King, Hunce Voelcker, Pat Nolan, Paul Mariah (& me behind the camera, as usual). Hart Crane was born in July 21, 1899, and it says 101 year birthday party, but Hunce died in 1990, so it’s 1989.

RRWG 10th annual erotic poetry reading at the Burbank Activity Center

RRWG demise? The reports of its death were greatly overexaggerated

Missing page 2

Obligatory Hug, June, 1984, Russian River Writers' Guild, Maureen Hurley

RRWG Erotic reading at the Burbank Activity Center with Donna Champion, Marianne Ware, Lee Perron, Pat Nolan, Gail King, Zara Altair, Bonnie Olsen, Maureen Hurley, Paul Mariah, Hunce Voelcker, Joe Pahls, Helen Dunn,

RRWG reading at the Burbank Activity Center with Donna Champion, Marianne Ware, Lee Perron, Pat Nolan, Gail King, Zara Altair, Bonnie Olsen, Boschka Layton, Maureen Hurley,

Word Art, Women’s Art Month, Lincoln Art Center Gallery

Benefit show Guerneville Vetrans Bldg

CPITS benefit reading at Guerneville Vets.

I didn’t realize that Pat Nolan was poetry editor of the Sonoma County Stump before I came along six months later.