[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.
so, many congrats to Linda on retirement! Love the mini-replicate! and lastly, I do believe that birdcage was granny holts originally….
noted and corrected in the Text…
I only realized within the last few years that when I left NYC to travel the world for more than a year in the Fall of 1969 (I had spent the summer of ’64 there then moved to the city permanently in February ’65) that I was not just setting out to see the world, going TO something, but I now see I was also going AWAY FROM something else, and it was the collapse of what had been sweet and lovely about “the 60’s”. I managed to see out there a big chunk of the world before television arrived, before international corporations bought the world, and marketing became the ruling force. Yes, Altamont. Vietnam. Everything changed. I suppose we had been just “babes in the woods”, but it WAS lovely: To be 22 in NY or SF in the 60’s! How lucky we were.
Everybody’s sixties was different, probably, though the specter of Vietnam hovered over us all.
For me the early years, here in California, were golden, but by the end of the decade the ‘darkness’ of Altamont was pretty much, backstage anyway, business as usual. One thing I was really happy to miss was that Woodstock fiasco; watched it on TV from a roadhouse in Yellow Springs, Ohio. another story…
Congratulation Linda Fleming, Emerita.
And for anyone interested in the era of the late 60’s this is a terrific book [link below]
I heard the author, Clara Bingham, talk at writers conference in Sun Valley which led to the reading of her text. Basically she takes one year, to tell the story of this intense and critical time period. Riveting read and compelling way to describe the era. Best book I’ve read on times which deeply influenced many of us.
https://www.amazon.com/Witness-Revolution-Radicals-Resisters-Hippies/dp/0812993187
PB
The Emerita is happy, happy with her time at CCA [formerly known, in her time, as CCAC] and happy, so far, to be heading on…
A friend, whom I’ll quote anonymously as he’s as invested as anyone in the period, wrote me; “…candidly I don’t have a lot of patience with 60s nostalgia…never matches my memory of the time.” I’m somewhat the same, but Clara’s book sounds essential although 656 pages [?] really?] might try my patience, too…and given the title I doubt much of it would correspond with my memories, either. “Altamont”, having been there and known people involved, was more like another perspective on a faraway land through which I once traveled. “Revolution Radicals Resisters Hippies”…they all, like Tim Leary, brought the heat, but nonetheless I’ll add it to the summer reading pile, time travel division. I already have those two museum catalogs, though somehow managed to slip away without seeing either show…and still haven’t given either book more than a cursory glance.
What a glorious post, linking our precarious past with our precarious present amidst the vivid sensations of a life wonderfully seen and articulated….Congratulations on Linda’s retirement
With all best wishes, XXX
Congratulations Linda, great shots Mike.
Oh my, the little truck is just exquisite!!! I wish I were Stuart Little and could hop in and drive it! I remember going to a big concert on Mt. Tamalpius back in those sixties, when I was graduating, taking care of a baby and working on my art…not a part of it all except for a few concerts. Dwight and I went and there were many Hell’s Angels in attendance so Altamont did not surprise me. We have already had some brush fires down here on account of said ample fuel!