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| marantzo |
 Posted: Sun Jan 25, 2009 9:38 pm |
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Mo, I'm familiar with self publishing and there is a company that I checked out avbout a year ago and they look very good and legitimate. They always write me with offers, but I am not ready to do that.
Betsy, I just listened to Keiller this morning. I never heard his Guy Noir bit. I am anxious to get back to my own P I, but things have been sort of all over the place on my trip so I might not add to it till I get home. |
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| marantzo |
| Posted: Sun Jan 25, 2009 9:47 pm |
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Oh, wait. Yes I have heard that Guy Noir series. Last year when I was here I heard a few episodes. I didn't remember that his name was Guy Noir. Funny stuff. There was a Canadian radio series called Simon Crump that I loved. It was the same kind of stuff. A clueless earnest private eye who kept solving crimes by going in the completely wrong direction.
An example. he found a man hanging by his neck (dead) and the murder victim had scratched B. Prep on the ceiling. Simon interpreted the clue as being a what the victim had scratched but had died before he finnished and surmised that b prep was the beginning of "be prepared", the Boy Scout motto and thought he had been killed by a Boy Scout. Of course the killer was someone named Barry Prep. |
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| Marc |
| Posted: Sun Jan 25, 2009 10:52 pm |
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Joined: 19 May 2004
Posts: 8424
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SUZEN
“Suzen painted pictures sitting down like the Buddha sat”
The “zen” in Suzen is perfect. She did sit on the floor in a half-lotus position painting simple but beautiful pictures using a sumi brush and water colors, focused and still, Buddha-like. She was uniquely beautiful with long brown hair and green eyes that shone with a pure emerald light. We were both 16 and going to the same high school in Fairfax, Virginia. It was 1967, the Summer Of Love in the Haight Ashbury. In Virginia, it was the summer of longing. We were craving to get the fuck out of our boring suburban prison. We had started dropping acid, copping from a head shop in D.C. called The Source. It was run by Art Kleps, the chief boohoo of the Neo-American Church where LSD was considered a sacrament. At the time, acid was legal and we were getting pharmaceutical Sandoz. It was a beautiful thing.
High school becomes inane and immaterial once you’ve discovered the cosmology of psychedelics. Shit like algebra becomes a worthless abstraction, the ego chasing its tail, a mind game. The rituals of proms and sports and general conformity seem utterly ridiculous and a waste of time when you’ve traveled through the Bardo, died, been re-born and seen the shag carpet in your parents bathroom melt, re-form and expand like a hot pink hairy puffer fish. No more of that high school crap for me. And no more for Suzen.
Suzen was the first to make the move. She met, and I don’t remember how, a 32 year old creative writing teacher named Zoltan. He was a professor at the University of Baltimore and had a groovy bohemian pad in D.C. She moved in with him and I’d visit them on weekends. I was still in school but fading fast. In addition to acid, I discovered the writings of Alan Watts and a book by Alexandra David-Neel called “The Secret Teachings Of Tibetan Buddhism”. I had become a seeker of the truth. I wanted answers. What is God? Why are we here? What happens when we die? And who put the ram In the rama lama ding dong?
I was discovering a reality beyond the borders of my little suburban existence, a reality in which entire universes existed in every cell of my body and existence was one gigantic cellular mashup, a giant vibrating galaxy of neurons, wavelengths and vibrations slowing down into flesh and then speeding up and becoming spirit, a gigantic cosmic cluster fuck. Ego is an illusion, a fraud, a construct of lies, illusions, expectations and dead memories. Me? What's that? It's about WE, the infinite and eternal ONE, all of us interconnected, a gargantuan godlike group grope. "I am you and you are me and we are all together." The whole Universe is 69ing itself like some kind of profound porno movie. And when we cum, we cum together. Try going to wood shop class after experiencing shit like that.
Okay, so Suzen is in D.C. living with Zoltan and I’m visiting on weekends. Z, we called Zoltan Z, had a bunch of alcoholic beatnik friends and young acolytes like myself gathering at his pad on a regular basis. We’d all get ramped up on white crosses (benzedrine), pull out our rapidograph pens and write poems and make speed freak drawings (highly detailed, generally abstract doodlings) for hours and hours, entire days. Z put a sign on his apartment door that said “POETRY FACTORY. DO NOT DISTURB”. At the end of these marathons we’d read our poems out loud and pass around our drawings and then crash on makeshift beds on the apartment floor.
I remember one morning, after a weekend of being on the poetry factory production line, being woken up by The Beatles singing at full blast
“Good morning, good morning...
After a while you start to smile now you feel cool.
Then you decide to take a walk by the old school.
Nothing has changed it's still the same
I've got nothing to say but it's O.K.
Good morning, good morning...”
Z had placed stereo speakers one on each side of my pillow and dropped the needle into the groove of that track on Sgt. Pepper’s and cranked up the volume. I bolted upright, startled and still half asleep, and there was Z smiling at me and Suzen handing me a plate of freshly griddled pancakes. Head trip humor and a great breakfast.
I wanted to be conversant with Z and his friends, most of whom were writers. So, I devoured every book that Z gave me to read. Most important of all the books he gave me, at least in terms of confirming my desire to be a writer, was Charles Bukowski’s “CRUCIFIX IN A DEATH’S HAND”. Bukowski blew me away. He made writing look simple (simple is hard). His style was direct, it cut to the bone, no literary affectations, poetry honed as sharp as a switchblade and just as lethal. Bukowski didn’t fuck around. He called it as he saw it. Unlike Ginsberg and Kerouac, Bukowski was not part of a bardic tradition, he wasn’t a mystic (though all great art is inherently mystical), he wrote in a style that I’d call poetic noir. He wrote about the ordinary day to day bullshit in a way that summed things up in an almost Zen simplicity and with dark humor. He found truth and profundity in a bottle of beer and an old whore. He wasn’t looking for God in the stars or wheat fields. For Bukowski, God was sitting at the end of the bar nursing a Pabst Blue Ribbon and talking to himself. When I discovered Bukowski in 1967 he was an underground poet with a small but devout following. Of course years later he became a huge international success selling millions of books. I was lucky to discover him when I was young before all the hype. Nobody had to tell me he was great, I figured it out all on my own.
I continued to hang with Z and Suzen on weekends while enduring High School during the week. Then things came to a head when I was thrown out of school for having long hair and being a general trouble maker. The school principle called my father and told him I had been expelled. When I got home all my possessions were on the front lawn. My father had gone apeshit. I grabbed a pillow case, stuffed it full of clothes, walked to the nearest freeway entrance ramp and stuck out my thumb. 3 days later I was in Los Angeles with a plan to eventually go up the coast to San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury. Why was I in L.A.? Because that’s where whoever picked me up was heading. Its called going with the flow.
SUZEN to be continued…. |
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| marantzo |
| Posted: Mon Jan 26, 2009 10:37 am |
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| mo_flixx |
| Posted: Mon Jan 26, 2009 11:36 am |
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Joined: 30 May 2004
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marantzo wrote: Mo, I'm familiar with self publishing and there is a company that I checked out avbout a year ago and they look very good and legitimate. They always write me with offers, but I am not ready to do that.
What about a web page on the internet?? |
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| chillywilly |
| Posted: Mon Jan 26, 2009 5:21 pm |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
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Location: Salt Lake City
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marantzo wrote: I gave up trying, chilly. Not only was it almost impossible to get a publisher to read it, the same was true for the literary agents. If I get the energy I'll give it another try down the road.
Sorry to hear that, although Mo's suggestion is a good one and the avenue I am looking at going down for one of my short stories.
One of the people that I follow her blog has already had a couple of her books electronically published and will be selling them for under $5 a copy.
I've liked your story and I think it's one that could have potential, put in front of many readers. |
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Chilly
"If you should die before me / Ask if you could bring a friend" |
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| chillywilly |
| Posted: Mon Jan 26, 2009 5:23 pm |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
Posts: 8250
Location: Salt Lake City
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| 1st Wave on Sirius has put THE NAILS "88 LINES" in regular rotation. Heard it on the way into work this morning and started thinking about the first two chapters Marc has posted out here. Catchy stuff. |
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Chilly
"If you should die before me / Ask if you could bring a friend" |
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| chillywilly |
| Posted: Mon Jan 26, 2009 5:23 pm |
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Joined: 20 May 2004
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Location: Salt Lake City
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marantzo wrote: Mo, I'm familiar with self publishing and there is a company that I checked out avbout a year ago and they look very good and legitimate. They always write me with offers, but I am not ready to do that.
Didn't see this post before I posted my previous one to you. |
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Chilly
"If you should die before me / Ask if you could bring a friend" |
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| Marc |
| Posted: Tue Jan 27, 2009 12:21 am |
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Joined: 19 May 2004
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Suzen continued...
Having long hair and hitchhiking across the States in 1967 wasn’t some kind idyllic existential romp through a Whitmanesque landscape of welcoming masses with genial hearts and arms wide open - quite the opposite. Cars would drive by me and the drivers or passengers would hurl bottles of beer or spit at me cursing at the tops of their depraved fucking lungs. I remember getting the shit beat out of me by a bunch of drunk long haulers at a truck stop in Nevada. It may have been sweetness and light in San Francisco, but in the rest of America I was a pariah, a piece of hippie shit, a peace loving pinko bastard. But I made it to L.A. unbroken and determined to let my freak flag fly.
I didn’t last long in L.A. I was crashing wherever I could. There was a network of hippies who had apartments or houses that would provide a brother with a place to stay for a night or two, crash pads, where usually a dozen or so teenyboppers were spread out on the floor in sleeping bags, often two to a bag fucking.
One night I was hitchhiking on Santa Monica Boulevard when a police car pulled over and two cops got out to I.D. me. I was 16 under age in L.A. without adult supervision. Busted. They took me to jail, called my parents and arranged to have me flown back to Virginia.
I remember getting off the plane in Virginia and being greeted by my mother and a bunch of my friends who gave me a hero’s welcome. After all, I was the first to have leaped across the fence to freedom. I had turned my back on suburban conformity and security and took a chance on the unknown. My friends envied and respected me. My mother was just happy to see me alive. When I got home, my father acted as though I wasn’t there, though I knew deep down he was relieved that I had made it home in one piece.
The day after I got home I went visit to visit Z and Suzen. They greeted me with love and a new found respect. Suzen admired me, Z treated me like an equal. I no longer had to prove that I was one of the chosen few. I had graduated from the Jack Kerouac School, a road scholar, I had earned my dharma bum diploma with flying day glow colors. A month later we were to become neighbors.
There was no way I staying in the suburbs of Virginia. With my mother’s help, I moved into an $85 a month apartment on P street off Dupont Circle, the hub of hippie activity in D.C. Dupont circle was where hippies and Blacks and bums hung out, selling dope, playing music and philosophizing. I was two blocks from Z and Suzen’s joint. |
Last edited by Marc on Sat Jan 31, 2009 7:06 pm; edited 1 time in total |
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| mo_flixx |
| Posted: Sat Jan 31, 2009 6:36 pm |
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Joined: 30 May 2004
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| More bedtime stories please, Marc. |
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| Marc |
| Posted: Sun Feb 01, 2009 12:03 am |
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Joined: 19 May 2004
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I made modest living selling hashish. Pot was hard to come by, but hash was everywhere. It was being smuggled into D.C. by foreign diplomats and their assistants. I had every kind of hash imaginable: Tibetan temple balls, Morrocan primero, Lebanese, Afghan, Nepalese, a veritable salad bar of resinous bliss. I wasn’t some kind of big time dealer. I was a middle man between a good source and some suburban kids who’d come to D.C. on weekends to cop. I eventually branched out to selling acid. I was getting high grade Owsley white lightening LSD from my former high school English teacher John and his dentist boyfriend.
It was a hot and humid D.C. afternoon and John and I were capping white lightening powder into gelatin caps. We were wearing surgical gloves and masks so the acid wouldn’t get into our mouths and pores. White lightening was extremely pure and powerful LSD. At one point, we stopped to take a break. There was a fan next to the table where the pile of acid was stacked. The fan pointed away from the table and kept the humid air circulating and relatively dry. I had taken off my mask and was feeling slightly high from being exposed to some of the powder. John was feeling higher and did something stupid or divine depending on how you look at it. He got up and turned the fan in the direction of the table and the pile of acid. The white lightening became a psychedelic dust storm flying into my face, my mouth and my eyes. I ran to the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. I looked like Marcel Marceau. But this wasn’t clown makeup. This was several 1000 micrograms of high grade LSD. I started splashing my face with water, irrigating my eyes and washing out my mouth. But, it didn’t help. The acid was kicking in and I went through the ultimate death trip. Timothy Leary said if you didn’t go through the death trip experience on LSD you hadn’t taken enough. Well, I had. I sat on John’s living room floor and for what seemed like an eternity (and it was) I died, was reborn, died again, born again, flipping the metaphysical tv dial from cosmic station to cosmic station, whipping through the Bardo planes where hungry ghosts growled and laughed and mocked and danced and poked at me with their long ancient galactic fingers, chakras opening/closing , kundalini doing the serpent power mambo, passing through dimensions that not even Rod Serling could imagine, walls shimmering and breathing, rainbows everywhere, mandalas spinning like heavenly roulette wheels…I was so fucking high! And as far out and in as I went, I never lost it. I was so overwhelmed that my ego made no attempt to resist. I was without fear. I felt at one with everything, huge, expansive, complete and unbounded, totally absorbed by the entirety of the Universe: GOD, whatever you want to call it, I was there, in that moment of complete union with all things. I was no longer functioning as a separate entity; there was no fear because the one who would have been doing the fearing no longer existed. This was enlightenment. 12 hours later as I started to “come down”, I felt exhausted but refreshed, renewed and reborn. Within a matter of days, I returned to being my usual egocentric little self. But, I had had a genuine religious experience, one that I often return to to put things into their proper perspective. LSD was wonderful. I would later discover that peyote had a deeper message. I’ll tell you about that later.
Suzen…to be continued |
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| jeremy |
| Posted: Sun Feb 01, 2009 8:22 pm |
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Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 6794
Location: Derby, England and Hamilton, New Zealand (yes they are about 12,000 miles apart)
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| Marc is at his best swimming on the surface of a surfeit of reminiscence: the emotion of his wake allowing the light to play on the otherwise hidden depths; his easy verisimilitude assuring us that the experience is real. However much though I may believe and enjoy this distillation of the fermented mash of Marc’s memories, I cannot let it cloud my senses. Envy? Resentment, even? My generation ate the dust of the baby boomers, and our bildungsroman, bogged in a the slough of anger and disappointment that was the after-the-party seventies, was more bitter. For me, instant karma feels as real as instant mash. Also being from England, where the roads are short and only serve to speed one from one identikit town to another, The Kerouacian myth seems alien; escape is not a fast car, greyhound bus, or a mind-expanding drug. The vastness of the American psyche makes me wary. The best British poetry and music is often rooted in the prosaic; finding consolation; noticing the beauty that was always there. I chime to Ray Davis more rather than Bruce Springsteen, |
_________________
I am angry, I am ill, and I'm as ugly as sin.
My irritability keeps me alive and kicking.
I know the meaning of life, it doesn't help me a bit.
I know beauty and I know a good thing when I see it. |
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| Marc |
| Posted: Sun Feb 01, 2009 9:04 pm |
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Joined: 19 May 2004
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Jeremy,
can I quote that post on my blog? |
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| Marc |
| Posted: Sun Feb 01, 2009 9:13 pm |
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| jeremy |
| Posted: Mon Feb 02, 2009 3:13 am |
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Joined: 21 May 2004
Posts: 6794
Location: Derby, England and Hamilton, New Zealand (yes they are about 12,000 miles apart)
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Marc,
You're blog seems to be experiencing techncolor technical problems, but please feel free to copy and paste my comment. I might not agree with half of what you say, but you are always eminently readable. |
_________________
I am angry, I am ill, and I'm as ugly as sin.
My irritability keeps me alive and kicking.
I know the meaning of life, it doesn't help me a bit.
I know beauty and I know a good thing when I see it. |
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