Jimmy Jazz's Blog

Surfing has been a gift—from my brother-in-law who gave me a board, and also, considering the time required, from my wife. When I paddled out into 10′ waves with the great poet of the sea Michael Klam last winter, with no hope of dropping down the face of one of those monsters, but only to watch other crazy people do it up close, I realized that this was my midlife crisis.

Every epoch in a life should come with a rite of passage.

Last Sunday I stepped on a Stingray by Scripps pier.  I imagine that anyone who spends time in ocean water is bound to step on one and meet its defenses. A young French boy in my class, over the summer, skim boarding in the afternoon, found one in Coronado. I had to laugh, ‘I’ve been here 50 years and never and you only 2 weeks.. Ha.’ He was a very sweet young man with a love for action adventure and I’m sure he will collect scars like stories through his exciting life to come.

I know. I know. Shuffle your feet. Walking in and out of the water, I dutifully scraped my feet along the bottom to send any loafing stingrays out of my path. When I felt its tail whip around to the top of my foot, touching me like a slimy tentacle, I was in waist deep water enjoying a lazy Sunday morning. Michael Klam had brought his stand-up paddle board and I struggled to balance and rowed around. I could see stingrays in the water. So I knew they were there. A little later trying to catch a small wave I fell off the board in shallow water –THWACK! I knew exactly what it was.

‘That little bastard was setting me up for the sharks.’ Mr. Klam had seen a class of leopard sharks near the pier.

It felt like someone cut me with a razor and dropped a bee sting into it.

I went home. It was nothing. A scratch.

But the pain started building.

Pretty soon I was online looking for a course of action.

I soaked my foot in hot water, and that really did jam the nerves, blocked the pain. And I took a nap.

The next day was a little sore but no problem.

I had read online that some people experienced infections after not being able to remove barbs from the wound. The curse of decaying alien DNA and its bacteria.

Eight days later, around 3 in the morning my foot was itching so bad it woke me up. The foot swelled through the next day, and the flesh felt dry, dead and spongy. The wound weeped clear liquid like tears.

It made a hard bike ride up Broadway. 

Friends online urged me to go to the doctor, so I called out of work and made an appointment at Kaiser. The young Doctor wasn’t from around here. He’d seen snake bites and a bear mauling, he said but no stingray wounds. So he sent me to a different Kaiser across town, and so we enter the copay vortex, which reminded me of a story from The Book of Books that I have nicknamed ‘Kafkaesque:’

From Jimmy Jazz’s The Book of Books #BoB #Kafka #Kafkaesque

The Castle • Franz Kafka

I fell off my bike on the boardwalk in Pacific Beach and injured my left wrist. My primary care physician said to make an appointment with a physical therapist. I called and they told me there were no appointments available. I’d found myself in a bureaucratic feedback loop. A mess of medical legalese. I emailed the doctor, explained the situation and asked Is this what Kafka was talking about? He responded I don’t know who this Kafka fellow is, but the radiologist in India hasn’t looked at your X-ray. I was flabbergasted. I looked around THE CUBE and saw I was alone. Horribly isolated and alone. I couldn’t share this anecdote with anyone. I remembered a girl in one of the other departments had studied philosophy, a temp, but found her desk empty. They said She is no longer with the company. Was I wrong to think there should be such a thing as common knowledge? I called Angela cause we watched that Steven Soderberg movie Kafka but she said Who’s Kafka again? Ok Ok, I don’t think cultural knowledge indicates intelligence. I’m sure my doctor knew plenty I didn’t, but don’t books, stories and ideas exist to connect us to other people? I remembered Ashley read The Hunger Artist in one of her classes. I knew she hadn’t read The Trial or The Castle or Amerika, but I decided to call her anyway. She laughed. Yes my daughter laughed and by laughing, saved my life. I wasn’t alone, overreacting or crazy. A few nights later Angela and I dined with Rochelle and Stephan. Rochelle met Stephan at Humboldt State when she was studying to be a botanist. They were literate people. He’d worked in a bookstore and she named her cat Pushkin. We drank a few beers, and fell into a comfortable silence, so I risked the anecdote. I related word for word my exchange with the doctor. Silence. Death. A grave. The !*#™¿@ crows and buzzards and jackdaws circled. Rochelle said Who’s Kafka? I looked at Stephan. He worked at a bookstore. He was from Austria confound it. A four-hour drive from Kafka’s Prague. He leaned back in his chair, puffed at his meerschaum pipe and patted his stomach. I read The Castle, he said without hubris, very quietly, as was his manner, which lead us to converse about things “kafkaesque” and may have pulled me out of another desperate ditch. The Castle is a perpetually modern novel, one that may never lose its flavor. I felt, while reading it, like I’d walked through a car wash, that the spinning bristle-brushes had scraped away skin and flesh, leaving my exposed nerves hanging from my bones like downed power lines. At least the buzzards wouldn’t have a place to rest. I told my anecdote to everyone. I couldn’t stop myself. Bill liked it and Tamara laughed with that laugh that makes you feel like everything’s going to be alright. Cecil must have appreciated it, because when I saw him at Voz Alta, he said Tell Lizz with Two Zs your doctor story. —He gave me six months to live, I quipped, which turned out not to be so funny, because Lizz said Oh, I may have ovarian cancer… I don’t think everyone should read the same books, but reading Kafka might help anyone who feels like a cog in the machine better understand the works.

Order The Book of Books Now 

On its most basic level The Book of Books is a collection of writings about 1300 books.

It wants to be everything that was ever a book. So it uses non-fiction & fiction– fact & narrative. It’s a memoir about a life entangled with reading, the autobiography of a reader, a novel about friendship, a polemic against meaningless work.

It’s an an enquiry concerning human understanding as it cuts like ice through literature, science, history, sex magick, religion, politics & art.

It contains interviews, reviews, poetry, a play. It has tables, maps, a family tree, diagrams, photos & illustrations.  It has a thumb index!

A glacial book like this takes a few pages to get moving. It starts with an appreciation by a life-long reader, my mom. And builds toward the first vignette with a preamble, preface, forward, introduction and prologue.

Its arc follows a 30-year partnership with a woman I love. Somewhere in there we had a kid & lost one. It floats from job to job. Drinks with Bukowski, fucks with de Beauvoir, hurls misery with Raymond Carver, fights oppression with Malcolm, Huey, Howard, Noam, Emma… hits the road with Kerouac. And crumbles into a ball of loss with Toni Morrison.

For awhile I felt like Gumby entering the books I read. I spoke in a Scottish brogue while reading Irvine Welsh and banged on the glass inside the bell jar. I was searching the labyrinth of Borges’ infinite library with Kafka by my side in search of David Foster Wallace. He said that books could save you from loneliness, but they didn’t save him. We walked through Lynn Tillman’s piss-smelling tenement hallways and slept on Garcia-Marquez’ cum-soaked sheets. We feasted with Michael Pollan and sang like drunks in a midnight choir with Leonard Coen and Dee Dee Ramone. And then the book stores started closing. And the headlines rang out the death of the book. I bought cheap ones at library book sales, and picked them up from back alleys around the city. I thought I could save them.

I crossed paths with some of the great writers of my generation, studying hard in the shadows of ‘America’s 37th Most literate city.’ My family, my friends taught me so much over the years, but one thing I learned from a book was that people move on to later phases of their lives.

This is for my friend Jim Ricker. 1954-2015

Elegy for Jim 

by Jimmy Jazz

An elegist like an astronomer should know more of a moon or a man than its gibbous phase. -anonymous

A screaming came across the sky

on Broadway two hours after sunrise

as a black crow darted before the cityscape,

a small hawk in pursuit of his tail feathers…

reminding me, strangely, of conversations

in a teacher’s lounge

at a language school

in San Diego

with our friend Jim Ricker

Jim, Hippie Jim,

parsing the spoken words of his interlocutors

asking each to think & re-think

before speaking

the talons of his sharp logic clipping some who dared

use anecdotal evidence to support a claim

Hippie Jim, there was a fry cook in your heart

and a prescriptive grammar Snoot

A fry cook flipping hotcakes in a Sunday rush

at the big kitchen

Hippie Jim with your Master’s degree

where is your long hair now?

a fry cook who never minced words

& a usage cop with an etymologist’s nightstick

upside the head of the Green Grocer— Who

does he think he is with his ’10 Items or Less’ sign?

Hippie Jim, you old polemicist, you coot

never angry

but always ready and able to argue

EVERYTHING!

Hippie Jim, with your long hair

were you a Marxist?

Can you explain for me one more time

Marx’s Labor Theory of Value?

You old union man, you Wobblie

you Uber-hater

We’ll kick hell out of any scab that crosses your picket line

Hippie Jim

Why were you shaking your fist

at the lack of common sense in the Ottoman Empire

over coffee with the muse?

Yer cantankerous-misanthropic-curmudgeon mask

didn’t fool the people you loved

A circus tent couldn’t mask a heart like that

Hippie Jim, will they bury you

in bolo tie & seersucker coat?

Will your hair be long in heaven?

Will you give Jesus a piece of your mind?

Will God pour you a beer & with a slap on the back say, Good Job Buddy?

Hippie Jim, you could be sober

a thousand years, or a thousand lonely nights

and all your courage & conviction

wouldn’t stop us finger-waggers from waving your final vices

like a red flag— Did

you really eat a 7-11 chili dog & chocolate milk

every fucking day?

Any man who can find joy in the grit in the bottom of a styrofoam cup of Folger’s,

can be happy in this world.

O, secret joy teacher!

ask your students to seize the day

tap your enthusiasm

in class & field trips

to places they have never been

Jim, Hippie Jim,

You Teacher

You Reader

Who will speak at length about the great writers of our time?

Who will follow Pynchon & Bill Vollmann,

who will read Edward Abbey’s FBI file,

and care about David Foster Wallace?

Who will throw his body on the gears of the capitalist machine?

And wonder in what desert Edward Abbey lies?

Jim,

You teacher

You Reader

You Study-hard

You Knower (of so many things)

History dies with a man like you

History falls into the memory hole

Jim,

You Knower

You Carer

You Talker

Your hawk soars above the tower,

the crow count his days.

FREE JEFF OLSON, Free Yourself

The law seems to have changed since I got in trouble for using sidewalk chalk to make a political statement during a strike in the 1990′s. Notice that the will to squish speech that challenges authority figures remains the same.

from Jimmy Jazz’s novel Where Life is Inappropriate

Day 9. It’s family day on the strike line. Mr. M brings his two girls and I bring Alaska and Caledonia. –Take this sidewalk chalk and sketch out a hopscotch. The bossy sister takes the chalk and draws a series of lopsided squares. The striking teachers hop with picket signs on their shoulders. The older sister draws a funny caricature of her dad, depicting Mr. M with a huge pumpkin-like head.

–That’s great! I say. Inspired, I chalk a portrait of every single teacher on the line, surrounding the school sidewalk. 42 separate pictures. I draw Mr. Stone with his stern face; I draw Ms. Fox with a bushy foxtail. I sketch Mrs. W with her bald chemotherapy head.

This high is as temporary as it was necessary, and for a while we feel as fresh and ready to confront the administration as we did on the first day of the strike. Like drug addicts we need more to catch the same thrill. School lets out and the children mill around the portraits.

–There’s Mr. I.

–There’s Mrs. W.

–Mr. M looks like a fat guy, one of the kids says. The simple chalk drawings seem to make everyone happy. The principal walks along our line in a 3-piece suit using a walkie-talkie to direct the school busses.

–Who’s responsible for this? he asks Mr. Stone. The principal’s a squat, stocky man with a head like a potato. He likes to talk about the fistfights he got into growing up in the Bronx. He likes to think of himself as a tough guy. He looks at the drawings, fists resting on furtive hips. He flicks his nose with his thumb. Fingers point at me. –This is vandalism, he says. –We need to call the police. He turns and marches back into the school.

The next morning Mr. Stone, the strike commander calls me aside. –An official complaint has been sent to your file.

–How come?

–It says you hit somebody’s car with your sign, he informs me.

–I did? I say sort of dumbfounded and unaware. The strike has been on for near 2 weeks; we all expect it to settle over the weekend and now this.

–And please no more stunts like the chalk drawings, he says. –Did you write the word SCABS on the entrance to the teacher’s parking lot? The impulse to cry fades into what it must feel like to be a scapegoat.

–This is bullshit. I talked to a cop about the sidewalk chalk, it’s legal, a free speech issue. You can’t spit on the sidewalk, but drawing on it with chalk is okay. It’s sidewalk chalk.

It rained overnight. The portraits, like our resolution, faded but remained intact.

In the late 1980′s Tom Meyer, Pat Haley and I taped punk rock shows in San Diego, CA. We taped over a 100 bands. The promoters, were usually very cool to us. Tim Mays for one saw the documentary value in making these videos. The band managers would sometimes say No. No you can’t video. Bad Brains said no. The Cramps said no (but we were able to sneak into The California Theater and tape that one.) Black Flag said yes, but then stole the tape.

This particular video was shot at San Diego’s Carpenter’s Hall. My uncles used to go down there to wait for construction jobs in the 70s. IN the 90′s it was called The Art Union building. Pat Haley actually had a studio in there where he painted his masterpieces. Today the building is the new home of The San Diego Reader. Ha. But In the 80s Tim Maze Presents put on some great punk shows there. We saw Bad Brains, GBH, The Grim… and local bands like The Front. We started taping this particular show. We taped Frontline, a band from San Jose and Blast… and only this one song from The Exploited. They were making their own two-camera video on that tour and wanted exclusivity. It’s fine.

At the start of the video, Wattie references another show 2 years before “that was bullshit eh?” at the State Theater. That was a great show even though the power went off. The kids were chanting Exploited songs until Wattie got pissed and threw the mic stand which hit the drum kit and they went off stage. A great day in punk rock history. There was an Anarchist Picnic at Mission Bay earlier where we saw Ministry of Truth, Manifest Destiny and a bunch of other bands. When the cops came to break it up, the punks start throwing rocks and bottles. Wattie dedicated the first song that night to the kids who went to jail. The theater was condemned and ‘Exploited UK Subs and Dr. Know’ remained on the marquee for 5 years.

The thing we should never forget about the 80s was the terror we experienced worrying about Ronald Reagan with his shaking hand on the nuclear apocalypse button. And since Maggie Thatcher, one of his cohorts, died yesterday, I thought I would post this video in her honor. Wattie from the Exploited famously said (or inspired) the truism ‘Punk’s not dead,’ but also said “We’re not a fascist band.” This song decrying Thatcher’s war in the Falkland Islands gives his claim street credibility. ‘Let’s star a war said Maggie one day/ with unemployed masses, we’ll just do away…” So Fuck You to Thatcher, Reagan and anyone who uses fear to rule over people.

For those of you who didn’t get a chance to see my first featured performance in several years at The San Diego Art Institute; my good friend, the film maker, Eric Rife taped the event with his professional gear. I edited the raw footage into a kind of spoken word/puppet show video using Final Cut eXpress.

The video depicts me declaiming a chapter from my novel The Cadillac Tramps (for sale in the lobby.) I wish we’d had another camera to catch the audience participation aspect of the show. I made 22 puppets which members of the audience kindly waved around during the performance. Since punk rock, at least, everyone is in the show. Enjoy.

I walked downtown today, to the old library (you must refer to it heretofore as the ‘old’ library with the new one looming.) The Friends of the Library hold a book sale every Friday. I was fortunate enough this morning to pick up an extra copy of William S. Burroughs Naked Lunch.

Inside I found this note:

Interesting book - enjoy the drug stuff & the hippie stuff - just skip the gay stuff & the gross stuff cb

I love finding things in books. Notes or random bookmarks. Here are a few entries from The Book of Books which explore this near-fetish.

# Ashley reminded me that I once used a peeled sheaf of blistered skin from the bottom of my foot for a bookmark. I’ve used receipts, paper money, condom wrappers, letters, photographs, strands of Angela’s brown hair, postcards, smaller books, cough drop wrappers, a plucked blade of grass, fallen leaves, pencils, clean squares of toilet tissue, and scraps of paper with scrawled phone numbers in a pinch. At the moment I’ve got a promotional bookmark from Microcosm Publishing stuffed between the pages of Tender is the Night and a business card from Adult Protective Services tucked in Gravity’s Rainbow. The used booksellers at Abebooks.com claim to have found Thousands of dollars, a Christmas card signed by Frank Baum, a Mickey Mantle rookie baseball card, a marriage certificate from 1879, a baby’s tooth, a diamond ring and a handwritten poem by Irish writer Katherine Tynan Hickson.

# Found an appointment slip dated January 7th for the Downtown Mental Health Center between pages of The Portable Paul and Jane Bowles at the library. It may have been in the book 3 months. My first thought was that our friend whose name appeared on the slip planted it as a kind of art project, later I realized she was clinically crazy.

also from The Book of Books by Jimmy Jazz

Naked Lunch • William Burroughs — Kerouac titled this book for Burroughs supposedly because it forced one to see what was on the end of the fork. My belief that the writing trumps the writer doesn’t preclude me from being fascinated by cults of personality. For a long time I thought the beat generation had three people in it. The rest I described as hangers on. Burroughs was so far out (Norman Mailer called him a genius) it would be difficult to hang on. He had no imitators. I find him jocular in the extreme. There was a talking asshole in this book, for god’s sake. Some mods I knew back in high school would hover around their Vespa scooters talking of Dr. Benway, which I mistook for a Beatles reference. I vaguely suspected it had something to do with drugs.

Overcoming the résumé gap.

I’ve had a lot of jobs and taken time off from work and gotten new jobs. When they ask about those gaps in the resume, I just tell them the truth. I was writing. I’m a writer. It doesn’t always pay the rent, so I need to work. But what about the reverse, the gap in the writer’s resume? Inexplicable periods of no artistic production. What should I tell my desired readers?

Sorry I was working in a bank.

Jimmy Jazz Performance History: a list of featured readings*

2013

2012

2011

2010

2009

2008

2007

• Drunk Poets Society @ Winston’s

2006

2005

• The Avant Garde summer performance series w/ Anarchist Think Tank @ SDSU

• Peace & Freedom Party fundraiser w/ Theresa F, Jim Moreno, Diego Davalos and Squiddo @ Hot Monkey Love Cafe

• San Diego Slam (first place) @ Voz Alta

• Full Moon Invitational Slam w/ minerva, Michael Klam, Ant Black, Al Howard, Shana, Trish Dugger, Josh Flemming, John Rubio… @ La Paloma Theater

 2004

• The Science of Blowing Up: w/ Cecil Hayduke, Michael Klam, Beth Lisick and Tara Jepson @ Voz Alta

• The Science of Blowing Up: summer reading series

w/ Michael Klam, Cecil Hayduke, June Melby, Jeff McDaniel, Steve Abee @ Voz Alta

w/ Michael Klam, Cecil Hayduke, Michelle Tea, Bucky Sinister, Anna Joy Springer @ Voz Alta

w/ Michael Klam, Cecil Hayduke, Jervey Tervalon and Derrick Brown @ Voz Alta

2003

• The Greatest Spoken Word Show Since Sliced Bread w/ Lydia Lunch, Daphne Gottlieb, Hal Sirowitz, Michael Klam & mc Cecil Hayduke @ Casbah

• Spoken Word Circus w/ Junk Boy Sideshow, Bucky Sinister, Michael Klam and Cecil Hayduke @ Muse Records

• City Works 2003 featured writer @ City College

• Blame Canada spoken word show w/ Alexis O’Hara, Tarin Towers, Michael Klam and Cecil Hayduke @ Current Affairs Bookstore

• Poetry & Art w/ Vejea Jennings and host Michael Klam @ The San Diego Art Institute

 2002

• National Poetry Slam in Minneapolis

@ TGI Friday’s w/ SD  slam teim

@ Glüek’s Bar w/ SD  slam teim

• West Coast Championship Poetry Slam w/ SD slam teim @ Henry Miller Library, Big Sur

• Las Vegas slam team v. SD slam teim @ Espresso Roma, Las Vegas

• Las Vegas slam team v. SD slam teim @ Urban Grind

• Mesa, AZ slam team v. SD slam teim @ Urban Grind

• Full Moon bi-annual poetry slam @ La Paloma Theater

• Artscape III w/ the SD  slam teim @ Galoka

• Laguna Beach slam team v. SD slam teim @ Wells Fargo, Laguna Beach

• San Diego Grand Slam @ Urban Grind

• Lydia Lunch presents The Unhappy Hour @ Parlour Club, LA

• Gynomite spoken word show @ Dizzy’s

• The Bus v. The Sub w/ Steve Abee @ The Whistle Stop

• City Works Anthology reading @ San Diego City College

2001

• What the Fuck: avant porn anthology release party w/ Michael Hemmingson, Larry McCaffery, Hal Jaffe, Raymond Federman @ Dizzy’s

• Dos Mil Espacios festival w/ Michelle Serros… @ San Diego City College

• Slam! spoken word competition featured reader w/ Jervey Tervalon @ Occidental College

• Urban Grind Poetry Slam (1st place)

2000

• Poetic Brew featured reader (aka the potato gun incident) @ Claire de Lune

• Secret Lives spoken word show w/ host Mary Leary @ Lestat’s

• Anarchy in the Cerebral Cortex Tour

w/ Lob @ Club Mesa, Costa Mesa

w/ Steve Abee @ Bookbound, Silverlake

• Union of Progressive Presses Party w/ Peter Plate, Upski and Bob Rosen @ Fireside Bowl, Chicago

• Spoken Word Show w/ Douglas Martin, Tamara Johnson, minerva @ Dizzy’s

• FringeFest w/ Tarin Towers, Todd Colby and Big Poppa E @ Tonic, NYC

• Superstars of Spoken Word w/ Pleasant Gehman, Shawna Kenney, minerva, Jon Longhi @ Dizzy’s

• Gynomite: fearless feminist porn w/ Liz Belile, Linda Albertano, Pam Ward, Michelle Glaw, Carlisle Vandervoort, Sassy Johnson and duVernge Gaines @ Dizzy’s

• The Laguna Poets w/ host Pat Cohee @ Wells Fargo Bank, Laguna Beach

1999

• Cup of Culture w/ Jervey Tervalon @ Cal State Los Angeles

• Creative writing class @ Mesa College

• Creative writing class @ Point Loma Nazarene College

• Slamnation film screening w/ Angela Boyce @ the Ken Cinema

• Featured reader w/ Dennis Cooper @ Skylight Books

1998

• Slam film screening

@ AMC 20

@ Hillcrest Cinema

• It Came From Venice Beach spoken word show w/ Ellyn Maybe, Matthew Niblock and Jeffrey McDaniel @ 6 at Penn Studio

• Freak Farm USA spoken word show w/ Steve Abee and Angela Boyce @ Museum of Death

• Incommunicado Press presents and evening of poetry, punk and pussy w/ Steve Abee and Liz Belile @ Fringeware Books, Austin

World Book Expo 1998

Firecracker Book Award presenter @ Crowbar, Chicago

w/ Douglas Martin, LA Ruocco, Seam and aMiniature @ Fireside Bowl, Chicago

w/ Douglas Martin, LA Ruocco and host Shappy @ Quimby’s Books, Chicago

• Spoken word w/ Barry Graham @ punk squat house, Phoenix

• Spoken word w/ DJ Reza @ Club Bordello

• Spoken word w/ Creedle @ Casbah

• Citizens for Severe Literature benefit w/ Jervey Tervalon, Pleasant Gehman, Stephanie Juno & Noelle B @ Sushi Community Space

• Featured reader w/ host Lob @ Club Mesa, Costa Mesa

• Jordan for Congress fund-raiser w/ Shannon Gleeson and 9 Wind @ Claire de Lune

• Writing Center Poetry Contest judged and performed w/ Lizzie Wann and Michael Klam @ The Ould Sod

• City Works ‘98 reading @ City College

• Fiction Reading w/ Barry Graham @ Reid’s Books, Phoenix

• Backyard Superstar Project @ KCR Radio, SDSU

• Featured reader @ Sony Artwalk

• Spoken Word Show w/ minerva, Beth Lisick and Jeffrey McDaniel @ Twiggs

• Creative writing class @ Point Loma Nazarene College

• Featured reader @ Fahrenheit 451, Laguna Beach

1997

• Ruse-a-thon w/ Gilbert Castellanos, Taco Shop Poets… @ The Ruse

• Chiapas Benefit @ The Ruse

• Incommunicado Revolutionary Fiction Tour

w/ Peter Plate, Barry Graham and Don Bajema @ The Ruse

w/ Peter Plate, Steve Abee and Barry Graham @ George’s Gallery, Los Feliz

w/ Peter Plate, Barry Graham @ Edinburgh Castle, SF

• Incommunicado ‘Weekend of Destruction’ Tour

w/ Dave Alvin, Barry Graham, Steve Abee and The Bedbreakers @ Casbah

w/ Dave Alvin, Barry Graham, Steve Abee @ Skylight Books, Los Feliz

w/ Dave Alvin and Steve Abee @ City Lights Bookstore, SF

w/ Hank Hyena & Tarin Towers @ Intersection for the Arts Theater, SF

• First Wednesday featured reader @ The Writing Center

• Spoken Word that Doesn’t Suck w/ Clebo Rainey and Angela Boyce @ The Ruse

• Featured performer w/ KCR Freestars (aka Adams Avenue Street Faire Riot) @ Adams Avenue Street Fair

• Live Out Loud w/ Lizzie Wann, Stickman XXX, Jesse Cunningham, Elyse… @ Java Joe’s

• Pacific Review: afternoon of fiction, poetry and music (aka klown suit debacle) w/ Chris Baron, Martha Kinkade, Dr. Gerald Butler @ Casa Real, SDSU

• Starve Theater @ The Ruse

• Peace & Freedom Party 30th Anniversary w/ Marilyn Jordan, Shannon Gleeson and Angela Boyce @ Intersection Gallery

• Gas, Grub & Grammar Road Show w/ Hank Hyena, Juliette Torrez, Victor Infante, Lisa Verlo, MI Blue, noelle b @ Intersection Gallery

• Spoken word show w/ Stevie Harris and Abel Ashes @ the Ruse

• Valley Contemporary Poets featured reader @ Glendale Federal Savings, Canoga Park

• Revolutionary Spoken Word w/ Steve Abee, Liz Belile, and Barry Graham @ Skylight Books, Los Feliz

• Featured reader @ Sam’s Book City, North Hollywood

• The Devil’s Playground: writers in performance w/ Barry Graham, Marina Blake and Jack Evans @ Mars Gallery, Phoenix

1996

• “School House Rock” (Teacher Strike Benefit) w/ Ray Brandes, Dizzy, Creedle and Several Girls Galore @ Casbah

• Spoken word w/ Several Girls Galore @ Brick by Brick

• Spoken word w/ Creedle @ Brick by Brick

• Native Tongues w/ Thomas Riley, Stephanie Heyl, Rafael Saavedra, Eclipse @ The Ruse

• Word Fuck series w/ MI Blue, noelle b and Michael Hemmingson @ The Fritz Theater

• Featured reader @ The Gypsy Den, Costa Mesa

• Featured reader w/ Noelle Franklin @ Paradise Lounge, SF

• Featured reader @ Java Hut, SF

• Featured reader w/ host Bucky Sinister @ The Chameleon, SF

• National Organization for Women (NOW) Stop 209 Benefit w/ Cindylee Berryhill, Dizzy and Conglomerate @ Casbah

• The Sub book release party w/ Tamara Johnson and Jahson Edmonds @ Rita Dean Gallery

• Readings from The Sub

@ Borders books

@ Blue Door Bookstore

@ The Museum of Death

• Jordan for Congress fundraiser

@ Intersection Gallery

w/ Mukana and host Jose Sinatra @ Joe & Andy’s Bar

• Fetish and Taboo w/ noelle b, MI Blue, Annette Lambert, Daniel Printz @ Rita Dean Gallery

• Neighborhood Threat w/ Barry Graham, Peter Plate and Steve Abee @ Rita Dean Gallery

1995

• Lying, Cheating & Stealing w/ MI Blue & noelle b, Marnie Webb, Dan Whitworth @ Rita Dean Gallery

• Dirty Work w/ noelle b, MI Blue, Tamara Johnson, Dan Whitworth @ Rita Dean Gallery

• The Pig Ritual @ Rita Dean Gallery

• Featured reader @ South x Southwest, Austin

• No Pity Tour w/ Stewart Home, Peter Plate & Jubilee Dunbar @ Rita Dean Gallery

• Spoken Word: an evening of performance poets w/ Liz Belile and Noelle b @ Wikiup

• Spoken Word All-Stars w/ Dave Alvin, Iris Berry, Pleasant Gehman, Liz Belile, Nicole Panter and Steve Abee @ Beyond Baroque

• Exploded Views CD release w/ Rae Armantrout, Quincy Troupe, Angela Boyce…

@ UCSD

@ Wikiup

• Independent Music Seminar organized and performed w/ The Watt’s Prophets @ Museum of Death

• Spoken word w/ Creedle @ Casbah

• Poetry slam (1st place) @ Intersection Gallery

• Spoken word w/ Creedle @ Casbah

1994

• Lollapalooza

@ Kansas City

@ Minneapolis

@ Milwaukee

@ Chicago

@ San Diego

@ Los Angeles

• Qualifying Poetry Slams for Lollapalooza organizer & host

@ Casbah

@ Wikiup

• Inch CD release party w/ Doi-oi-oi-oi-oing @ Casbah

• Word Circus w/ Doi-oi-oi-oi-oing @ Wikiup

• Live fast, Doi-oi-oi-oi-oing w/ Fearless Vampire Killers and host Cole Heinowitz @ Gelato Vera

• Independent Music Seminar w/ Michele Serros, Linda Albertano, Pleasant Gehman, Tamara Johnson, Rich Ferguson @ Rita Dean Gallery

• Elements of Change w/ Collective Conscious @ Royal Food Mart

• Spoken word w/ Doi-oi-oi-oi-oing, Fern Trio and Cole Pylyshyn @ Cafe Chabalaba

• Spoken word w/ Creedle @ Casbah

• Spoken word w/ Creedle @ The Boiler Room

1993

• Smashing the TV w/ Doi-oi-oi-oi-oing @ Cafe Chabalaba

• Independent Music Seminar spoken word show w/ Pleasant Gehman, Iris Berry, Nicole Panter, Tamara Johnson… @ Wikiup

* venues in San Diego unless noted

Posted a video from the archive on my You Tube Channel.

Just got back from listening to Reg E. Gaines preview his theater piece The Last Celebrity. He’s really good. I feel like I got free pass for the $55 seats. Thank you San Diego Public Library! I was telling Librarian Bob that I hadn’t done a real featured poetry reading since SDSU’s “Avant Garde Festival.” I told him a little about how crazy the show was, but I didn’t realize, until just now, that it was in 2005. I haven’t done a real performance in 8 years. That’s crazy. I had told myself when I was still in my 30s that I was going to take a ten year hiatus, because who wants to see 40 year olds yammer on about their shit… but I thought I was joking… that’s one of my problems… I don’t even believe myself half the time because everything is a joke.

Reg E. Gaines is the kind of sincere, forthright, ernest poet who when he says something, you believe it. He could sell you anything, precisely because he’s not selling anything. He’s real. And the real thing. I would need photographic evidence.

The truth about why I stopped performing is difficult. My creative philosophy: read more than you write; write more than you share, has been in force. Been reading a lot, and after writing a 500-page book about books, I’ve struggled to get all my novels in print. The Cadillac Tramps and House of the Unwed Mother are in hand, so I’ve decided to try to read from them, even though it scares the shit out of me. But the real truth is that public performance is a horse I fell off. A rabid-wild-ass bucking horse that dragged me across the cobblestones. It’s like riding a bike, once you fall off, you never forget.

After putting so much energy into the Avant Garde Fest I felt like I had nothing left. I was spent, exhausted. The show killed a part of me. It nearly killed some of the poor people in the audience, and they loved it.

A minor epiphany put me on the road back to public life, curtesy of Slavoj Zizek who described the Marx Brothers in Freudian terms: Groucho, the ego, Chico, the superego and Harpo the unspeaking ID with its prurient energy. Honk honk. And I thought Yes, that was our SDSU show. It took me 8 years to process it. Cecil Hayduke, the inimitable ego, as the Imminent Jeopardy game show host, ostensibly suit and tie man in charge. Michael Klam, whose motto before a reading is “Let’s Teach”, quoting Ghandi and the bible, the moral agent of the super-ego, and Jimmy Jazz as Poetry the Klown, silent, in charge of bodily fluids and total fucking chaos.

I wrote about it first in the wee hours of 2005, and its taken 8 years for all the gaffs, flubs, tech failures etc to boil out and leave the show standing as one of the greatest performances ever seen on the SDSU campus. Fuck The Ramones in 77. This was:

“beer, blood and piss: reading poetry with the anarchist think tank”

Woke with a heavy head. Body sore; aches like break rocks in the sun. Angela’s face isn’t bruised, a fine thin cut along her nose, didn’t scar. Show started before the show started. Poetry the Klown mugging for a photo with a couple of coeds out on the campus of SDSU holding a sign “Poetry Reading this Way?”  The nice SDSU professor is saying a few words of introduction when Ted Washington, all 6’5″ greased and totally naked, taps him on the should and says SIT THE FUCK DOWN. Ted is huge, naked and greased like a wild animal. On cue, ‘Anarchy in the UK’ blares out of the PA and two maniacs, Cecil R. Hayduke & a guy in a klown suit run from the back of the classroom (the show got moved from a theatre to a classroom, so we hatched a plot to destroy the idea of the classroom) and spray paint FREE on one wall and ART on another.

FREE ART.

Our plan was to do everything that is never done in a college classroom. They paid us $700, in advance, which we spent on beer and wine and passed out to the audience, who were drunk and unruly before the show started. We had a scantily clad cigarette girl passing out condoms and beers, lollipops, squirt guns and a can of octopus from the 99¢ store. Someone threw a firecracker they brought from home. It was on.

Ah the beautiful insurrection. The potlatch.

I still have nightmares of warning firing off in my head. Cecil Trebek slamming a beer on the floor in frustration, a yell from the mob “Don’t get mad, read poetry!” The leitmotif of glass breaking. I chased Contestant #3, a big beautiful SDSU blonde up the aisle with a chainsaw. The candy girl’s white fishnet stockings. Someone aimed a line from my poem back at me “You look like the kind of drunk who drinks discarded well drinks.” Whose Tecate is this in my hand? How many have I had? While torturing detainee.. er Contestant #2 I smeared menstrual blood on my face and asked to look in her backpack. Is this your copy of Catcher in the Rye? I spiked it into a trashcan whipped out my cock and pissed on it. It was the longest 10 beer piss I ever took. It would not stop flowing… the urine kept going and going… I could hear laughter. You usually dont want to hear laughter when your dick is out.

Contestant #1 said his name was Bean. His punishment was what the CIA calls Extraordinary Rendition, what the Dating Game used to call a trip to Egypt. We duct-taped him inside a cardboard box for the duration of the show. He escaped using a Zippo lighter to burn his way out. Late in the show, while I was supposed to be reading poetry, Zurie, who’d been blowing out sax riffs from the seats got into the box with Kandi… Klam read from the bible and told everyone to stop eating animals before their eyes turned to meat crumbles. I can still hear Angela, bleeding… adrenaline racing…“You are not sorry. You don’t come over here and cop attitude on me after you hit me with a beer can. You didn’t mean to do it, but you did. You did it.” Angela asks everyone to own her behavior. “I feel like an asshole,” Kandi said. They hugged and cried together like they had shared some tragic life event.

By the end of the show it was becoming very difficult to listen to poetry. Who wants to think about poetry when a sexy couple is inside a box making poetry on stage. Imaginations were not the only thing running wild. Other people jumped up and stuck cameras into the box flashing for an upskirt. Damn perverts didn’t send me any pictures. Then Angela stormed the stage and started ripping the box apart. This is epic because Angela is very shy and would never perform on stage. She hates all forms of confrontation. She didn’t want me to spray paint the walls or piss in front of an audience. She wasn’t even going to come to the show and her stomach turned for days with worry. She said after, “I knew how hard you worked on this show… and no one was paying attention to you.”

I stage dived onto the box and Kandi came up swinging—POW!- socked Angela right in the nose with the full beer can. And blood flowed like wine. I left the stage at that point, laying on top of Angela backstage, holding her, wiping the tears and blood (I forgot I was wearing the wireless mic) and she says, so stoic, “Go and finish the show!” “No I want to stay here with you.” She yelled “Go!” which you could hear echo over the PA and I staggered back on stage to read a poem, drunk with rage, “You look like the kind of boy a priest would fondle…” Pointing fingers. Growling, totally crazed and out of body experience. “What are you doing at a poetry reading, there’s a war on?” We invited them to this reading which was, kind of War Redux. We wanted to illuminate war for what it is, but I was thinking about the party, the lack of sacrifice, I mean there’s a war on, where is the belt-tightening, the call to conserve. Orwell seems so prescient. We’ve always been at war. And I thought about every president from Roosevelt to Bush II bombing some impoverished enemy.

The best thing about this “poetry reading” was that everyone who was there left, alive, with a totally different story. Cecil Hayduke’s memory will reflect his vision, Michael Klam will have seen a hundred things I missed. And, most important, each member of the audience will remember this show. The creation of a situation at SDSU was ugly, small, flawed, yet somehow epic and sublime.