[this all being a bit awhile ago now] To celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Summer of Meth a couple of the local museums are putting on wannabe blockbusters; in Berkeley it’s mostly didactics and politics while the De Young is all, equally predictably, flash and fashion.  My old friend Jeanne Rose, revisiting some of her sixties notoriety, recommended Joel Selvin’s exhaustively researched  “Altamont”, from which I learned among other many things that the Stones never played better than when under the gun[s] there and never did anything of note again, eloquently illustrating, if nothing else, Mr. Selvin’s not entirely misplaced Frisco-centricity.  The book definitely brought back the darkness of that day and the machinations behind it [given the documentation “Blame it on the Stones” in this case couldn’t be more apt].

To many Altamont came as no surprise; the ‘sixties’ were dark for me for instance by the winter of 1965-66, never to regain their sheen, whatever sheen might have existed previously, stoned or unstoned, and I was not entirely alone in that.

The literature teems with colorful acidic esoterica, endlessly chronicling the prodigious amounts of chemicals people were continuously ingesting…But, hmm, not me, not by then.

Well, not that much anyway.

Meanwhile, here in the present moment*, a bit of old-timey automotive cosmetic intervention, a dog, a pottery iguana in the garden,

all bright, sunshiny and windy rolling through a last California week; chilly springtime one day, summer the next with the hills already browning

into an alarming amount of fuels for the upcoming fire season.

In the backyard my grandmother’s birdcage, passed down to mom, my sister and then to me which now holds the wooden biplane Bryan painted in the Page Street basement around 1978

plus an oil can from Scossa, Nevada, early eighties, where everything was shot full of holes: History.

In the studio studiously plotting/plodding along, leaving things most likely unresolved

while down by the bay, hey, a last little look…

before a final barbecue in the industrial zone.

Thursday, though initially prospects for getting away seemed daunting, became the last day

and counting.  i took the ’45 out for a couple of farewell shots before our early departure over to Rockridge for summer wines and the CCA parking lot where Linda said she needed to meet “Tony”, insisting I come too, as

Tony was Tony Esola, shop manager for jewelry/metal arts, from whom she’d commissioned a jewel-like rendition of the ’45 in copper and silver as an unbeknownst not even suspected by me major birthday birthday present, to astounding effect and total surprise.

Following that mind-boggling experience we still had, as Steve Beal remarked, a “bittersweet” event to attend…the emeritus/retirement/going away party in the Oliver Art Center.

It wasn’t mobbed exactly, but a nice crowd, somewhat subdued; good food, a few speeches, a little wine.  Old school; many of them in fact went all the way back TO the old school – CCAC – with as many as forty, thirty, some maybe less years with the institution but now stepping, like my wife, whose tenure ran a mere thirty-one, back and away into lives unknown.

After that all that remained was to go home for a latish night in the library…Emerita!

Symmetrically to end in Darkness [as Above, so Below; Darkness] as we consider our great deluded land slipping ever deeper into a monolithic authoritarian populism cynically administered by the NBA, a tiny cabal of Narcissistic Billionaire Assholes implementing the immersion of both media and internet under whatever inky sludge threatens to take over this human world next.  Their Feckless Corporate Cunt at the FCC poised to privatize the internet is named something very like Ratshit Pain** and onscreen he or it doesn’t appear to be so much in- or un- as non-human.  Even scarier is the imminent consolidation of broadcast networks into ATT [All Trump Television], with manipulatory potentialities so all-encompassing as to make a Hitler or a Stalin weep with envy.

So I guess I’d best pack up and get out while it’s still vaguely possible…at least away from the leafblowers of busy bustling Benicia.

Bye the bye.

Bye bye.

M

*”now” was then; the week of May 11 – 18, approximately.

**admittedly “Ratshit Pain” can’t hold a candle to “Anthony Weiner”, but that scene set an impossibly high bar.