Syncretism

Three year-ends ago Jane Coffee and I took a trip to the South Coast where she showed me her camera theories and I took this meta-photograph of her photographing the moss-draped pine trees in Bullard’s Beach State Park. We were cold but the day was crystal clear that morning and the early light made everything look magical and new.

Two weeks ago I was in that area with my big brother Bob and his family. We took a side trip to Bullards after viewing the new Bandon Marsh restoration project. We were unwinding after a sad morning at Grampy’s burial service.

I took the opportunity to harvest some Spanish Moss. Not very much of it, but enough, it turns out, to make a voodoo doll.                                                                                                    Say what??

Last October when I told my friend Vera who is a sort of a wiccan type person spiritually nontraditional that I would visit New Orleans on my bus trip she got all excited that I would be down there where all those sideline practices of voodoo and hoodoo and other transplanted and swamp type religiosities are still practiced but me, I couldn’t have cared less.

My ex, Isheim, drove me around the Vieux Carre winding up at madam somebody or others voodoo emporium, but even I could see the voodoo dolls they sold were fakes made in Taiwan so I didn’t get one for Vera like I had planned. But I did start to wonder what was the deal so I have been reading up on it there’s tons of stuff on the internets and exhaustive material on Wikipedia. I found and bookmarked a site that gives step by step directions, and another site that changed my mind about this shit. It woke me up.

http://howtodovoodoo.com/how-to-make-voodoo-dolls/

This is the work in progress. I took my time letting the moss dry out and finding the skeleton sticks and meditating on my purposes and motivations and intentions. You have to be careful with this shit turns out it’s no joke. Throw out a bad intention and get nailed in the ass tenfold and I have seen that happen, not specifically with voodoo dolls but with other shit over my long and dangerous life.

Light blue is the color of family, and white is the color of healing.There's other color that I'm not so sure about but it feels right and it feels safe.. I need to do some healing and I want this thing to express my intentions and to gather the spiritual world to help out...

I have sort of an altar type place where I have some things that give me crucial vibes I won’t get into the details and it wasn’t intentional but I had this stuff I feel connected and tender about and then I scored a nice stand of shelf s out of the dumpster at the marina and these things migrated there so I’m putting my ingredients  on it to marinate the vibe.

And believe me, the vibe is there. As soon as the moss started to go around the cruciform it started feeling way bigger than me, and it was no longer a goof. To be honest it is scaring me more than a little but I think I'm OK so far. I will let you know what happens...

Hitting Bottom

 The little white and blue sailboat way in the back is Felicity Jane my lovely moneypit shown here standing in the Ilwaco Shipyard in June of 2009 where I spent three days scraping and painting her bottom.

 This is an obviously posed photo of me supposedly at work. You can tell it is fake my clothes are perfectly clean, the bottom has already been painted brick red so why the eff would I be sanding on a part of the hull that doesn't even get paint anyway? But I do look good and serious and competent.

 Actually I was just killing time until the travellift came to pick me up and put me back in the water. 3 days was all it took

The stupid little weak looking rope across there just holds the weak looking stanchions from splaying outward with the weight of the boat which is 6,600 lbs for those of you keeping score at home.

The travel lift is very powerful and it really didn't notice the weight. Still, it is a scary thing. The Ilwaco shipyard is a great place to work on your boat

I had such a crush on this guy.

What's with the Princes up in BC?

Whats up with the princes in British Columbia? Well, in case you wanted to know, here's what I found out.

 Rupert was an actual guy, a cousin of the king that got his head chopped off by Oliver Cromwell which is a hopelessly oversimplified version of what happened. The King was the chopee, not Prince Rupert, who was young and good looking and a bit of a dandy nobody knew least of all him that he was a gifted military mind and an inspiring leader who not only led the king's army in its losing battle with the roundheads , survived that whole mess, came back with the monarchy when it was restored ten years later but he then became a well respected admiral and practically the only consistently victorious commander in the whole sorry series of wars with the Dutch and the French and Spanish virtually everybody else on the mainland except the Germans and only because they didn't exist yet. A talented guy indeed. Lived to what passed for a ripe old age in those days, the 1600s...

Prince Rupert is only one of 50 cities in Canada named after present or past royalty. Social climbing snobbery at its worst. Having said that, I liked the town. But then I am a sucker for anyplace with salt water and boats and trees, and even some with no trees if the boats are there. I didn't do the place justice

 This guy, Lyle Campbell, is an amazingly talented sculptor.Taking a break from the monumental group of bears below, Lyle is making the first cuts on a commissioned leaping Orca. Commissions pay the bills

But shit like this group of anthropomorphized spirit bears is how I know Lyle Campbell is a genius.

This is a cedar bark hat under construction in a corner of Lyle's studio. There are very methodical coils of prepared cedar bark in racks on the wall above this bench.

This big kid is making the cedar hat. In another of an endless series of faux pas, I didn't even ask his name.

Prince Rupert has boats, trees, salt water, cool people, and a laid back attitude. I hope some day I have the good fortune to visit there again.

Del Cabo Daze

 Frank Stuart, left, with his lifelong pal Jack Devore, the two hippest characters I ever met, and  my pals as well. Frank learned color theory, classic oil painting and water color technique in the Art Alley at Folsom Prison. Jack Devore, a gifted artist, credited Frank with the  point of view that ultimately became Elastic Symbolism. Jack is , however, considered the founder of the small but influential west coast movement. His work may be seen at http://www.philo.com/

Jack and Frank, who went by the sobriquet Don Quiroga, loved to hang out in the shade and smoke reefer listening to bebop. In the late 50s, perhaps on his South American junket in the employ of  Safeway corporate headquarters supply division, Frank somehow acquired an old Spanish cape of a classical design. In the early 60s Jack and Frank traveled to Mexico, where Don Quiroga, a fluent speaker of barrio Mexican Spanish, introduced his pal Jack, who always wore the old cape, as Doctor Jose Del Cabo, his personal physician. In the early 90s Frank emigrated to Mexico, and Jack followed 10 years later. They had some very good years once again living in the same city on the west coast. Jack, who was in his early 80s at the time, died in 2010.
Frank Stuart, who is much older, possibly approaching his 90th year, is as far as I know still hanging out in the shade and smoking reefers and listening to bebop.

Photos by Jane Coffee

Mark Twain lived in a very weird house I think the bricklayer was a pothead.

Jane Coffee holding a Golden Delicious apple slightly past its peak while Jane has yet to reach hers.

Hartford has the inevitable RiverWalk modeled I believe on San Antonio's

I have permanent Nipple Erections and a totally fake smile

Goose Grease

My pal Nan has a photo on her facebook page of an osprey sitting on the head of a plastic owl scarecrow, which pretty much tells you how owls and ospreys relate on the food chain. I see them around the marina where my sailboat lives. The plastic owls.

Back in the summer of 1992 I made a very long voyage in a 14 foot rowing-sailing craft, putting in at West Linn above the falls on the Willamette, down through the locks and on down to Astoria in 6 days, no motors, thank you very much, and not much sailing either seeing as how the wind blows up the river in the summertime, damn near 24/7 as the saying goes. But I digress.

It took a very long and miserable Sunday to even get to Portland, you wouldn’t think it was that far down the river but it is, and there were ski boats all the way going very fast not much caring about the idiot with the dreadlocks in a little rowboat. Getting myself set up to take the massive breaking wake of one such high speed dimwad I pulled real hard on the starboard oar only to hear it snap off at the fulcrum under the leather. I fished it back together with some sticks and the leather and some tuna cord but it didn’t improve my mood any or help with the blisters that were rapidly forming on the palms of both hands and on the cheeks of my tender butt I can still feel them, and later on in the bathtub…but that is another story.

So it was with a certain feeling of relief I noticed a sparsely occupied small boat dock on the west bank under the Steel Bridge where the condos across from the freightyards at union station nestle along the river there in NW Portland between there and the Broadway Bridge. I rowed on past while I thought about it but not very far and it only took a minute to get back there and swing around to the inside of the dock and tie things up and collapse into the bottom of the boat and roll out my sleeping bag kind of squinched over and I slept on my stomach all night while the city around me clanked and roared. I was tired.

There was only one or maybe two other boats there, and a gate over the walkway to the headwalk so I might not get disturbed and the half abandoned look of the dock made more sense when I saw the three inch layer of goose poop that covered every foot of the dock. Those Canadian Geese, or Black Brant, or whatever they actually are are not stupid and they don’t bother to migrate any more they have easy pickings around the city.

Here last summer 19 years later, I was going by that same little dock,  and there are still only one or two boats tied up there but as I got closer this is what I saw. Some kind of horror-movie plastic wolf or fox with rabid red eyes in a very menacing pose. Two of them.

And it did look like there was considerably less goose poop on the dock.

Shit I never got to at the time: The Player

(This piece is from September but I never got around to putting it together until much later)

I saw Marlo Stanfield on the bus today. If you are have absorbed the cult favorite television series The Wire you know what and whom I am talking about.
I believe he got on the bus in Columbus Ohio. Late twenties, quiet, self possessed, dark skinned black man, short hair, sideburns, slender, apparently made of a very high grade of corfam stainless titanium wire. I'm saying no fat and no beef just whipcord. Extremely masculine.. Sat a few rows ahead of me on the other side of the aisle. What made me really notice him was the 4g wifi stick on the laptop he was operating in his seat as we rolled through the last of the summer’s greenery in lush eastern Ohio. For some reason, maybe I caught a glimpse, I have the impression he was doing his facebook thing, chuckling to himself, or maybe his email. I dunno.

Then I noticed the sneakers, new, nice, Nike. And the black Adidas tracksuit. I noticed that because I have black plush Adidass, and they weren’t any cheaper than Juicy Couture which aren’t cheap at all. I remember thinking they might not be Adidas but they were the good, and the Nikes might not be Air Jordans but they were the good, and I noticed he wasn’t young, even though he hadn’t hit thirty, no way, but he was alert, and serious, and he wasn’t worried about anything at all. That fact really caught my full attention. There's one thing that can yield such confidence. Street money.

Then later on we were on one of those stops that aren’t listed on the schedule, where the driver goes in to check for priority freight or passengers on or off and that’s it, back on the road. But the drivers that smoke cigarettes somehow hit these stops six or seven minutes early, and leave on time, and the smokers get off too and everybody burns one on the down-low. It’s a nice thing to do. One of these times I noticed the guy, the serious twenty-something black man with the quiet confidence standing there casually chewing the fat with our driver while they and the other handful of smokers had their smokes. He thanked the driver and made a gesture which I recognized with a start that he was passing a folded greenback like you do with a maitre' d that you wish to seriously and respectfully cultivate with gesture of gratitude, saying thanks man I appreciate the break, but the driver wouldn’t take it, which didn’t offend this fellow, he respected that, but the thing I noticed that it wasn’t a small bill either, and I been around enough street money and the guys that have it and I saw the play. What we had was a no-shit but surprisingly rare cash-carrying dope dealer, and not any of your sideways pistol, rap-slangin’ homeboy “playa” but the real thing. And that was why he wasn’t worried about anything at all, he had it covered, on the down-low but well sure of his world, and he knew I was watching, too, had me spotted as he come down the aisle in Columbus and so he knew I knew but that was ok, he even knew that, too.

There’s guys like that, complete situational awareness, and an ethereal sort of command presence.

I think he got off the bus in Philly.