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Marc
Posted: Tue Feb 03, 2009 12:18 am Reply with quote
Joined: 19 May 2004 Posts: 8424
Life in D.C quickly become monotonous. Other than my visits with Suzen and Z there wasn’t much going on. I needed a change. I decided to fly to San Francisco and finally visit the Haight. I was 17.
When I arrived in the Haight Ashbury in 1968 the Summer of Love had passed and the neighborhood was gradually becoming a cattle yard for runaways. Tourist busses clogged the streets, sightseers were everywhere and kids with no money were spare changing and ripping off weekend hippies by selling them bogus drugs. I spent most of my time on Hippie Hill in Golden Gate park reading books of poetry that I’d stolen from City Lights Bookstore in North Beach. Thank you Lawrence.
On Monday nights Stephen Gaskin, an ex- Marine and former teacher at San Francisco State College turned spiritual teacher gave lectures on spirituality at the Straight Theater. His style was irreverent, plain spoken and often remarkably insightful. 100s of people gathered for ‘The Monday Night Class”. Here’s a quote from Stephen’s website describing what was going on at those gatherings:
“The glue that held us [the Monday Night Class, also known as the 'Astral Continental Congress'] together was a belief in the moral imperative toward altruism that was implied by the telepathic spiritual communion we experienced together. Every decent thing accomplished over the years by the people of Monday Night Class came from those simple Hippy values. It was the basis for our belief in Spirit, nonviolence, collectivity, and social activism."
While Gaskin was an entertaining and silver tongued “guru”, he also had a massive ego. I was later exposed to that ego one night when he had a showdown with Alan Watts at Alan’s houseboat in Sausalito. It was “The Shootout At The OM Corral”.
I had moved across the Bay from San Francisco to Berkeley. I became involved with a theater company called The Floating Lotus Magic Opera directed by Daniel Moore. We were a loose knit collective of actors, musicians and divinely intoxicated idiots exploring ritual drama based on everything from Tibetan Buddhism, Native American mythology to the writings of William Blake and the work of Julian Beck and The Living Theater. We created our own costumes and masks and had our own makeshift orchestra consisting of all kinds of ethnic instruments. We performed at The Family Dog Ballroom and the Esalen Institute, but mostly in parks and outdoor amphitheaters. Our performances always concluded with the actors going into the audience and breaking bread that we ourselves had baked. Occasionally some of the troupe would end up sneaking off into the bushes to fuck willing members of the audience; this took the Living Theater concept to another level. The Floating Lotus Magic Opera made the Broadway production of “Hair” look like a slightly hipper version of The Partridge Family.
The Floating Lotus Magic Opera was given the opportunity to relocate from Berkeley to a beautiful mountain location near Santa Rosa. We pulled up stakes, left Berkeley, and created a community in the mountains. We figured this was the perfect environment to work on future theatrical productions. There were about 30 of us and we lived in makeshift lean-tos, tepees and tents. The land was formerly the site of an abandoned sawmill, so some of us took shelter in existing structures like giant conical sawdust burners and storage sheds. I bought a parachute form an Army surplus store, hung it from a tree and created a tepee-like living space, my translucent nylon cocoon.
While at our mountain retreat, it was our mission as actors/shamanic wannabees to go deep into ourselves and create a character for our next production. One afternoon, as I was walking through the woods I stumbled upon a rusty piece of metal lying on the ground. I picked it up. It was shaped like a dog’s face and was covered in moss that resembled hair. It became the mask around which I created my totemic self, a trickster, “dog howling at death’s hollow footsteps”.
I returned to the theater’s cosmic base camp, put on the mask and did a dance while improvising some wild dog-inspired poetry (you can imagine how ridiculous this shit was. But, I did it with conviction). The troupe loved it. My new character was going to be part of the production. Although, none of us knew what the production was. We were flying by the seat of our pants, though some of us weren’t wearing pants.
It was around this time when The Floating Lotus Magic Opera Company came to a fork in the creative road. We were stuck. There was little being accomplished in terms of an actual play to be performed, just a hodgepodge of mystical mumbo jumbo that hadn’t taken on the form of anything resembling a coherent, intelligent or even remotely entertaining theatrical spectacle. We needed a kick in our collective artistic ass. So, we did what most theater people did, we decided to eat some blotter acid and peyote tar. This is an age old tradition among theater people.
At this point, I invite all skeptics, cynics and those of you who possess simple common sense and little patience with the drug addled musings of a youthful mystic to skip ahead to the dirty bits where I describe getting my first blow job. For those of you who are curious about cloud formations that form their own language, group levitation, earthquakes as a form of psychic transformation and eating the good brown acid. Stick around.


Last edited by Marc on Wed Feb 04, 2009 3:25 am; edited 2 times in total
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Befade
Posted: Tue Feb 03, 2009 9:10 pm Reply with quote
Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 3784 Location: AZ
Quote:
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.


Jeremy........You've got something there. America is a long road country......and I know I've felt the euphoria of driving into the wide open spaces.......I never was one to respond well to mind altering drugs......but give me the open road.

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Marc
Posted: Wed Feb 04, 2009 2:10 am Reply with quote
Joined: 19 May 2004 Posts: 8424
It was around this time when The Floating Lotus Magic Opera Company came to a fork in the creative road. We were stuck. There was little being accomplished in terms of an actual play to be performed, just a hodgepodge of mystical mumbo jumbo that hadn’t take on the form of anything resembling a coherent, intelligent or even remotely entertaining theatrical spectacle. We needed a kick in our collective artistic ass. So, we did what most theater people did, we decided to eat some blotter acid and peyote tar. This is an age old tradition among theater people.
On October 1, 1969, the day the Floating Lotus planned to take our collective acid trip, there was an extraordinary and portentous occurrence. All morning and throughout the day threadlike clouds were crisscrossing each other forming diamond shapes. The sky looked like a giant sheet of graph paper that had been pulled askew. Some renegade clouds had broken from the graph and seemed to be forming celestial hieroglyphs, a language composed of frozen crystals. It was the strangest and most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. And those clouds seemed to be sending a message. Something was putting us on notice. But, it was a language I couldn't speak.
It was late afternoon, when the Floating Lotus gathered at a ridge that overlooked a valley that seemed to recede into eternity. We often went there in groups or alone to meditate or just hang out. But, this time we were on a quest. The 30 or so members of our group had taken acid (a few ate peyote tar) and were waiting for a vision, some creative guidance, a voice from on high. Fog started to roll in. It had reached the summit of the ridge, the valley obscured by clouds, as darkness started to fall. Someone in the group lit a match and leaned over to set fire to a bunch of wood we had gathered to create a bonfire. The moment the match was struck, the earth started to move, violently rolling and shuddering. A few of us were knocked of our feet. After a minute or so, the earth settled down. We had no idea what had happened. Was it the drugs? Had we had some collective hallucination? We all took a deep breath. The fire starter leaned over and struck another match. The earth went crazy again, heaving in waves and trembling. It was like riding an enormous undulating snake. And then it stopped. When the third match was about to be lit, someone shouted “no, no, don’t”! The person doing the shouting was absolutely convinced, as many of us were, that the earth’s shudderings were somehow related to the lighting of the bonfire. Moments later, the earth went into a major convulsion and we all hit the ground. Somehow, through this we managed to fumble about, form a circle and hold hands. Daniel, our director, started playing his zither and we all started chanting Om Mani Padme Hum (a Tibetan mantra on compassion but that in these circumstances translates to “I’m scared shitless”). As the earth continued to wobble and shake, our human circle started to slowly rotate in a clockwise direction and began to rise into the air. We were levitating. I know what you’re thinking. But, believe me I was there and we were levitating. I remember looking down through the middle of the circle and seeing the earth hundreds of feet below. That’s all I remember. When the sun rose we were all scattered on the ground, some still holding hands, all of us sleeping. As we awoke of course we all started questioning what happened. Had we shared some wild hallucination? Were we in the same dream together? Had we all gone momentarily insane What the fuck happened?

Later that day part of the puzzle was resolved when someone returned from town with a newspaper. On October 1, 1969, the city of Santa Rosa was severely shaken by two earthquakes. These quakes were distinctly felt throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, but it was in Santa Rosa where the most damage was done. The quakes were the most severe to hit that city since 1906.

An earthquake releases an incredible amount of energy. LSD sensitizes you to energy. A large group of people tripping on acid during an earthquake is probably going to experience something very much out of the ordinary, perhaps something mystical, magical, a little bit mad, who knows. Whether we levitated or did not, I don’t care. Something happened that was shamanic, powerful and life changing. Had the earthquake unleashed collective unconscious forces that might have been considered miracles in an earlier time, in those days when Jesus turned water into wine and rocks into bread? might have been considered miracles in an earlier time when Jesus turned water into wine and rocks into bread?
It was the last time I took LSD. I figured I had had an experience that would take a lifetime to integrate. The ultimate trip.

The Floating Lotus Magic Opera Company had their vision. We packed up our few possessions and moved back to Berkeley prepared to get down to serious business in putting together our next production.


Last edited by Marc on Thu Feb 05, 2009 12:52 am; edited 3 times in total
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mo_flixx
Posted: Wed Feb 04, 2009 11:36 am Reply with quote
Joined: 30 May 2004 Posts: 12533
Marc...

once upon a time you posted the photo of you with this theater company. Can you post it again?

You were (are) such a handsome dude.
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Marc
Posted: Thu Feb 05, 2009 12:50 am Reply with quote
Joined: 19 May 2004 Posts: 8424
The Floating Lotus Magic Opera Company had their vision. We packed up our few possessions and moved back to Berkeley prepared to get down to the serious business of putting together our next production.
After several futile weeks of trying to organize writing workshops and rehearsals, it soon became apparent that the Floating Lotus Magic Opera had run its course. Daniel was absorbed in his poetry and the rest of us were splitting off in different directions. We decided to do one last event at The Family Dog. It was a mishmash of old stuff and improvised new bits. I did my dog routine. We danced, sang and played our instruments with a wild unfocused abandon - a loosey goosey swan song (pun intended).
What made the night memorable was that we were on a bill with Alan Watts. He was the opening act. And Watts was indeed an act. He was funny and smart, a master of crazy wisdom, a Zen stand-up comedian. Stephen Gaskin was also part of the event. On this particular night, he was much more serious than usual and seemed to be competing with Watts as though this was a steel cage match between two wrestlers disguised as gurus. He questioned Watts’s legitimacy as a spiritual guide. He was throwing down and it wasn’t pretty. Frankly, Gaskins was coming off like a complete asshole.
We closed out the ceremonies with our performance and headed to Watts’s houseboat in Sausalito where we had been invited to join him for wine and conversation. Wine was a big part of Alan’s life at that point. He had become an alcoholic.
It was a lovely night. Alan was a great host and he and Daniel were shooting the cosmic shit keeping us all fascinated and amused. Then came a knock at the door. Alan’s houseboy opened it and standing there, along with his entourage, was Stephen Gaskin. Actually it wasn’t his entourage, it was his husband and two wives. Gaskin was in a four way marriage. He maintained it kept people more honest when three people could call you on your bullshit instead of just one. So, Stephen his wives and husband walk into Alan’s houseboat like they owned the joint sat down and Stephen proceeded to tell Alan that he was a washed-up, irrelevant old charlatan. Gaskin continued taunting Watts in a stunning display of rudeness, certainly not the kind of stuff you’d expect to hear from someone who considered themselves a spiritual teacher. Gaskin was being a world class prick. You just don’t talk to Alan Watts like that. Watts, along with D.T Suzuki, had done more to introduce Zen and higher states of consciousness to the United States than a thousand Stephen Gaskins. While Gaskin continued to rant, Watts just sat there soaking it in and smiling. Finally, he got up and took off his shirt, revealing an ample Buddhalike belly, and started beating on it like a drum. Alan didn’t say a word. He just kept beating on his big old belly while strutting around the room with a goofy smile on his face. This really pissed Gaskin off. The more Gaskin ranted, the louder Alan beat on his belly drum. We all watched in stunned silence as Alan, displaying the wisdom of a Zen master, effortlessly turned negativity and chaos into calmness and clarity, using wit and a simple gesture. His belly had outfoxed Gaskin. Alan didn’t argue, he didn’t resist, he punctured Gaskin’s egocentric veil with humor and an open spirit. Alan had won the battle by not battling. He created open space in which Gaskin’s ego spread out, spread thin and simply dissipated. It was a marvelous teaching from a great drunken old man. I was privileged to have witnessed Zen in action.
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Marc
Posted: Fri Feb 06, 2009 12:44 am Reply with quote
Joined: 19 May 2004 Posts: 8424
Thanks for the nice feedback on my book.

I am making some major edits on it, moving stuff around, expanding sections etc. So, if your interested in continuing to read 44 WOMEN, go to my blog

http://marccampbell.blogspot.com/

bookmark it and keep reading. And the blog is alot easier on the eyes.

Thanks, Marc
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Syd
Posted: Sun May 31, 2009 1:45 pm Reply with quote
Site Admin Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 12887 Location: Norman, Oklahoma
Oh, my:

On Visiting Westminster Abbey by Amanda McKitterick Ros.

Quote:
A "Reduced Dignity" invited me to muse on its merits

Holy Moses! Have a look!
Flesh decayed in every nook!
Some rare bits of brain lie here
Mortal loads of beef and beer,
Some of whom are turned to dust,
Every one bids lost to lust...

Famous some were --yet they died;
Poets -- Statesmen -- Rogues beside,
Kings -- Queens, all of them do rot,
What about them? Now -- they're not!


Other bad poems here. http://monkeyfilter.com/link.php/8736 "A Tragedy" by Theo. Marziais is also impressive, but not as poignant as the Ros.

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I had a love and my love was true but I lost my love to the yabba dabba doo, --The Flintstone Lament
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Syd
Posted: Sun May 31, 2009 1:51 pm Reply with quote
Site Admin Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 12887 Location: Norman, Oklahoma
Ros also wrote novels. Here's a quote from Irene Iddlesleigh I found in this month's Smithsonian:

Quote:
"Speak! Irene! Wife! Woman! Do not sit in silence and allow the blood that now boils in my veins to ooze through cavities of unrestrained passion and trickle down to drench me with its crimson hue."


Almost makes me want to look it up.

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I had a love and my love was true but I lost my love to the yabba dabba doo, --The Flintstone Lament
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Syd
Posted: Wed Jun 03, 2009 12:14 pm Reply with quote
Site Admin Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 12887 Location: Norman, Oklahoma
There's nothing like a couple of quotes by Amanda McKitterick Ros to shut down the reading room. I enter bad writing contests sometimes and occasionally win, but I acknowledge her superiority. But she actually thought she was a good writer, and wrote poems lampooning her critics. She was also known for massive overuse of alliteration, and writing long sentences that are totally opaque. Still, I'd rather read that than the long didactic poems the others wrote about dead children and the evils of drink.

The ellipsis makes me wonder if there's more to "On Visiting Westminster Abbey" than I've printed here.

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I had a love and my love was true but I lost my love to the yabba dabba doo, --The Flintstone Lament
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marantzo
Posted: Wed Jun 03, 2009 5:40 pm Reply with quote
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So she wrote witty weathered words with wry whimsy waiting, wondering worriedly when winning would wield the writing world's wrath wickedly upon her woeful work.
Syd
Posted: Wed Jun 03, 2009 6:01 pm Reply with quote
Site Admin Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 12887 Location: Norman, Oklahoma
marantzo wrote:
So she wrote witty weathered words with wry whimsy waiting, wondering worriedly when winning would wield the writing world's wrath wickedly upon her woeful work.


Pretty much. Try this one from Helen Huddleson (all her book titles are either alliterative or assonant):

Quote:
The villainous Madame Pear, "had a swell staff of sweet-faced helpers swathed in strategem, whose members and garments glowed with the lust of the loose, sparkled with the tears of the tortured, shone with the sunlight of bribery, dangled with the diamonds of distrust, slashed with the sapphires of scandals.."


Quote from Smithsonian. I like "swathed in strategem," but she really needed a synonym of bribery beginning with an s.

Apparently all the major characters in Helen Huddleston except Helen are named after fruit. (Sir Peter Plum, Christopher Currant, Lord Raspberry and his sister Cherry.) Her estate should have sued the creaters of Clue for copyright infringement.

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I had a love and my love was true but I lost my love to the yabba dabba doo, --The Flintstone Lament
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marantzo
Posted: Wed Jun 03, 2009 6:42 pm Reply with quote
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She a hoot.

shone with the sunlight of bribery

How about, 'shone with the sunlight of a schmear.' Or was she ignorant of NYC Yiddish expressions.
chillywilly
Posted: Thu Jun 11, 2009 10:02 pm Reply with quote
Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 8250 Location: Salt Lake City
What happened to Marc's blog?

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Chilly
"If you should die before me / Ask if you could bring a friend"
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yambu
Posted: Thu Jun 25, 2009 4:34 pm Reply with quote
Joined: 23 May 2004 Posts: 6441 Location: SF Bay Area
What follows is an absolutely true account , including the language, of our one afternoon and evening in Dingle Town, Republic of Ireland:

Guy walks into a pub. Before he can order his pint, the rest are ragging him unmercifully for a bet he'd made on a horse that finished last. The publican says to him, "I'd bet on a horse with arseholes for eyes before I'd bet on your boy there."

True story, and may God cut my balls off and sew them in my mouth if I'm lyin'. If you don't believe me, you can find the fool in Dingle Town at Foxy John's Hardware, which is not a hardware at all, or not much of one, but a pub. The loser's name is Chunky O'Brian, though he's not chunky at all, but smaller than his own dick. The place is named after Foxy John Monaghan. It seems that in 1890, when they were about to open for the first time, they were still without a name for the place. That very morning, at Curtin's Haberdashery directly across the lane, which is also a pub, of course, and also still pouring, Foxy John Monaghan, RIP, dropped dead before he could get his first glass to his lips, so they named it after him, or so they tell me. You can probably google it if you don't trust me. Anyway, the town has more pubs than fleas on the Queen.

The reason I was in there at all was because the wife and me happened to be strolling the streets, when she says, "Oh, look, an old hardware store", and in she goes. No sooner than she's in she's out. "It's not a hardware store at all, it's another pub", and so in I go. It is, indeed, also a hardware store, though with only a few claw hammers and things behind a counter. I'm told that when they first opened, it and the haberdashery across the lane were true retail suppliers, for farmers who on Mondays would drive their carts into town for Market Day, buy what they needed, and then have their Guinness right there. One-stop shopping.

But now I'm sitting next to Con, whose last name I never got, and immediately the two of us and others are talking about everything at once, when Con says to me, "Michael, I'm an uilleann piper (pronounced 'illan'), and a good one, and if you come to the An Conair Bar down the road tonight, I'll play you Danny Boy that will make you cry."

Now I'm thinking, I'm a tourist, and he's trying to sell me on that old cliche of a tune. "No, no, I love that song, and It will make you cry." Now the rest of the bar are already confirming he's a master piper, and a man as pure as his music. So that night Jennifer, son Jack, and I are at the An Conair. The music has already started as locals, old and young, and musicians are drifting in. At full strength they are, I think, three fiddles, some flutes, a concertina, two guitars, a tin whistle/bones player, and, of course, Con on the pipes.

The music is as rich and real as any in Ireland. Jack, who is a true student of it all, is already transported. There is a first-time visitor from Belfast sitting in on guitar, and he sings a few solos - "Fields of Athenry" and "Galway Girl". The woman flautist plays an Appalachian tune - Scotch-Irish, of course - that Jennifer knows well. And now Con delivers his long, long solo of "Danny Boy" on that most difficult and beautiful of instruments.

As the night builds, people of all ages are on the floor, dancing the two-step. The set approaches its end, and the place will officially close soon, although anyone who wants to - and that includes Jack - will stay long into the night. But for Jennifer and me, the final number is a guitar soloist singing Louie Armstrong's "What a Wonderful World", and that's when I lose it. Con is still in his chair with his pipes in his lap, as I reach my left hand behind someone and grab his. He can see the tears running down my cheeks as he gives my hand a firm sqeeze. We don't say a word, and then we are gone.

I could never have made this up.

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Melody
Posted: Fri Oct 30, 2009 9:18 am Reply with quote
Joined: 20 May 2004 Posts: 2242 Location: TX
Yambu, where have you been hiding all this time? You are a born travel writer. I felt I was right there in the pubs with you. And now I've got a tear in my eye, imagining a beautiful guitar solo of "What a Wonderful World."

What a wonderful piece.

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My heart told my head: This time, no.
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