Hunga Dunga: Confessions of an Unapologetic Hippie

It’s been said that if you remember the Sixties, you weren’t really there. Well, that’s nonsense. Phil Polizatto remembers, and that’s why we have this amazing, delicious fictionalized memoir to read. The narrator, Giacco Giordano, was an omnisexual youth in an era when young people proudly called themselves freaks. Like so many in that magical time, he looked for love and/or God, and often found both in the same place or person. His wanderings took him to Woodstock, various counterculture centers on the West Coast, and eventually, other parts of the world.

Giacco has a real way with words, and reading Hunga Dunga is actually almost like being there, which is a trite thing to say, but I don’t care. I constantly wondered what would happen next, and never wanted the book to end. I recognize these conversations, the kind we used to have (and some of us still have). I recognize the authentic quest for transcendence, and the goofiness. Parts of the book are very funny. Its title is the name of a commune, which in turn derived from a gag in a Marx Brothers film.

Other parts are very erotic. Giacco is, for instance, ecosexual before the term is even invented. It’s not all sparkly rainbows, of course. We get an eyewitness account of the 1969 Venice Beach police riot, which destroys a peaceful, beautiful anti-war gathering sponsored by the Free Press. One of the things worth looking at, about the Sixties, is why events like this radicalized some toward violence, while others were drawn even farther in the opposite direction, toward peace.

The descriptions of the physical world are wonderful and evocative, but here’s the thing: the very best part is being a tourist in Giacco’s head. There’s a basic, unquenchable sweetness to the guy, and crisply fresh insights, and an undertone of ironic wariness even in the midst of the most warm and fuzzy love-fests. Appreciating his worldview, seeing events through his particular eyes, listening in on his thoughts, and having the inside track on his responses to situations and people – these are the real rewards. I’m so happy to have met him.

So, studio at the beach having been wrecked in the police riot, Giacco is on the move again. He stays for a while with a couple who keep up a straight front for the neighbors while smuggling pot and hanging out with Timothy Leary. Then he joins up with Hunga Dunga.

Giacco is blessed with a personality uniquely suited for communal living. He’s both mystical and grounded, able to handle a spiritual crisis or run a farm. He has a willingness to roll with the punches that is sometimes literal, because longhairs both straight and gay attract a lot of harassment in some places. But that’s the outside world. In the context of the close-knit domestic group, the same inner resources provide the needed tolerance, and especially a gift for living in the moment. “I always tried to create a physical and emotional environment which left a window open for that rare breeze of opportunity.”

How did a Sixties commune actually work? How did a household of 12-16 members actually get along? Think it doesn’t sound like much of an accomplishment? Well, when was the last time you saw a family of even 4 or 6, that was able to create an ambiance where everyone could thrive, day to day? The Hunga Dungans may have worn mis-matched socks, but they figured out how to handle the finances. Being released from worry about food, clothing and shelter freed each person to do what he or she was best at, which is always a state to be desired.

Of course, a lot of these hippies lived on disability pay of one sort or another. This, Giacco says, “created in all of us, to varying degrees, a sense of obligation to justify the money we were getting from kindly Uncle Sam.” They joined up with a bunch of other communes to provide free services to the community. “We hoped we would become role models for the rest of society. When they saw how much sense it made, they would eventually ‘catch up.’” In other ways too, they did their best to model the kind of behavior they wished the larger society to imitate. “If there was any competitiveness at Hunga Dunga, it was to be a good example.”

We learn, intimately, what life was about in the big blue house. Lots of sex, for sure. Lots of drugs. Like the rest of the nation, they found that marijuana increased bonding, and so did the entheogens like psilocybin and LSD. Among other dangerous tendencies, this book could start a Peyote Cult revival. Also, like the rest of the nation, they found that when speed and cocaine came in the door, harmony flew out the window.

The recipe for harmony includes a whole constellation of customs and conventions and rituals that spontaneously develop to cope with ordinary human quirks. Thanks to Giacco, we eavesdrop on family meetings where issues are handled with a peculiar brand of non-handling. Differences are settled in non-traditional ways. “A Hunga Dungan might say at a family meeting that they did not enjoy living with so and so, but they would never feel they had the right to ask that person to leave. The hope was that the person would leave of his or her own accord. If not, we learned to live with it.”

Whether in the States or traveling in exotic lands, Giacco meets freak after freak, all with astonishing stories to tell. People turn up in odd corners of the world, whose karma is intertwined with his. One of the characters is a guy named Jon. Whatever comes to pass, his mantra is “This is much better.” And the optimal way to get through life with grace, is to walk toe-to-heel like a stalking Indian.

Some of the commune members start to hanker after land to farm, and wilderness to roam. Jon and Rosie get a farm, then sell it and take Giacco along with them for a round-the-world trip. Now, this is the kind of thing I mean, by a “you are there” feeling. “The floor was dirt and the only heat came from a small fire pit in the center of the room, which we fueled with small bundles of sticks, or sometimes pancakes of dung, sold by young boys whose sold job it was to deliver them to “subscribers” much like I delivered newspapers to my neighbors when I was a boy.”

The three of them go to a place that is a pilgrimage destination for Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims and Christians, where everybody gets along peaceably, and where, incidentally, the sun rises twice. They visit Sai Baba, my personal pick for the most intriguing of the holy men. They find the counterculture hot spots in Hawaii and Thailand. In Ceylon, they watch dead bodies float by in the river. In India, they buy ganga from children, and Giacco gets to know the deity Ganesh.

He visits Israel on his own, and spends time as a kibbutz’s unauthorized guest. There’s a horrendous boat ride on the Mediterranean, which is not all peaceful and sunny! He’s stoned in Turkey – literally, with rocks. He’s mistaken for a Turk by Greeks, and mistaken for a Greek by Turks, two of the most uncomfortable situations a person can be in. The locals don’t like waist-length hair on a male. In Samos, he visits a friend he made elsewhere, and it doesn’t work out too well, and he hears an amazing story. Amsterdam is “so damn civilized I could barely handle it,” and so much like San Francisco, he might as well have stayed home.

Back in the States, Giacco is reunited with the Hunga Dungans. He’s in the scouting party that goes to check out land. They find a great place, and have papers drawn up defining themselves as a church, so the contractual red tape will be less obstructive. They make friends with some of the locals. Just in time, they discover the Whole Earth Catalog. “We were determined to build a tasteful little Victorian dome that would blend in nicely with the neighboring farms.” In the city, they get demolition jobs and carefully take apart some houses, saving the building materials. A baby is born to the commune.

Still, Giacco is uneasy and feels that things are unraveling. People are a little too eager to envision how they will stake out a private section of the land. “Even though that was anathema, we knew deep down we all wanted someplace to go where we could be alone.” Like any sensible person, he acknowledges his ambivalence. Is this evolution, or devolution? And, much as he wants to keep the group spirit, ironically he winds up having the whole country place to himself for long periods of time.

The big new name in the spiritual realm is Guru Maharaj Ji, practically still a child. Giacco resists, figuring that anybody with that many followers can’t be authentic, an attitude borrowed from Jon. Then – one Hunga Dungan hitchhikes a long way to hear Maharaj Ji, and comes back converted. When another member decides to take off to find the Knowledge, Giacco spontaneously decides to go along. His motto is, “When in doubt, let the universe decide.” The first car that comes along is going to exactly the city they want, and the second ride takes them straight to the ashram.

There’s some weird stuff between Giacco and Maharaj Ji. Though he doesn’t capitulate right away, when three more Hunga Dungans announce they’re going to live at the Divine Light Mission in Hawaii, he goes along, carrying nothing but a wallet and a passport. It turns out to be not his kind of place at all, so he ditches the ashram after less than a day, and lives with a family. He holds down a regular job for a while, and visits the areas where the good weed grows, and a cave dwellers’ colony, and a cliff-dweller’s paradise.

Eventually, back at Hunga Dunga, he finds that his disloyalty is not popular. He’s not exactly shunned or ostracized, but he won’t be allowed all the way home, either. Instead, he’s deported to the country house.

It’s not total isolation, of course. People come up from the city, and they get close to some of the locals. Working naked in the garden, they distract pilots, who veer from their courses to ogle. Jon shows up for a while, then goes away again, and Giacco is alone at the Dome. On a hiking trip, he meets up with a ranger, and they have a three-day wilderness honeymoon. “We seek to satisfy our primitive and functional need for connection. Sometimes we do it in the least expected ways. There is a strange magic about it I like.”

In the country, after harvest, there’s the social season, of astonishing variety in such a remote place. More freaks are discovered holed up in different parts of the hills. The peculiar brand of morality and misplaced judgmentalness of some of the long-term residents is disturbing, and there is some friction with the Christians. One friend is scolded by his own collective: “You are spending too much time with Hunga Dunga. You are spending too much time with Giacco. You have fallen into their devil’s trap!”

And the snow comes. Lots of it. Cross-country skiing becomes the main occupation. Giacco is into and out of an affair with a confused man. A couple of Hunga Dungans arrive and he catches up on the haps. One member has become the first female master plumber in California. Another has bought the house in the city, and become their landlord. And one has a serious relationship with cocaine.

Then once again, Giacco is the only one at the Dome, which becomes the meeting place for the anti-ski resort activists. His life in the country is rich and satisfying, but it has very little to do with the other commune members any more. Reflecting on this, he wishes, “If Hunga Dunga is going to fall apart, let’s make it as graceful as possible, OK? Let’s make it end as beautifully as it started.”

Well, it does, and it doesn’t. Here’s the part I like. Giacco says the same thing about the commune as I’ve said about Venice, California. Not everyone who would like to live there, can. It’s not the same place it used to be, anyway. Living there is beside the point; it’s what you bring to the place and what you take away, that count. Here’s how Giacco says it: “So many have come and stayed for varying lengths of time in this big Blue House, and then left. When they were here, they were Hunga Dunga. And when they left, we can only hope they shared our vision and remained Hunga Dunga.”

The book at Amazon.com

Science Fiction: the Early Stage

This is all from memory, and includes only one stage of my career as an appreciator of science fiction. (The other stage was much later, and by then I’d learned to call it speculative fiction.) In the town where I grew up, the local library held, for some reason, a very generous selection of s.f. anthologies, and I must have checked out every one of them at least three times. This was when I was around 8-12 years old. Anyway, the stories are burned into my memory, whether accurately or not.

>>> Modern scientists visit a monastery in the Himalayas. The monks are reciting the nine billion names of God. They’ve been working their way through the list for millennia, and when they get done, the world is scheduled to end. The scientists scoff. I think the last line is, “One by one, the stars began to blink out.” Just calling it to mind still sends a shiver up and down my spine.

>>> A spaceman is marooned alone, and immobilized by a broken leg, on a strange planet where he may or may not be rescued by his compatriots. He plays a musical instrument (probably a flute or harmonica, it would have to be something pretty small.) To his amazement, another instrument joins him. The alien musician turns out to be incredibly hideous, but they play music together until the search party finds them and kills the ugly alien. The spaceship’s crewmen are astonished when the musician/spaceman does not thank them for saving his life. That was a heavy, heavy story, but the only way you’d ever know it is, if it happened to stick in your mind for, like, fifty years.

>>> I think this one’s called “By the Waters of Babylon,” and there’s a little girl named Sophie with six toes, which is bad news for her because of the pogram against mutants.

>>> The parents are both magicians, and they want their boy to grow up and take his place in the family business, but he’s a math geek, and of course he rebels against them. They summon up a terrible demon to scare their son into obedience, but an even more powerful supernatural entity appears, the Accountant, and he defeats the demon, and protects the boy’s autonomy.

>>> On this planet the sun shines only one day a year, and everybody looks forward to it. A mean boy locks up a girl in the school closet and she misses the brief appearance of the sun. I’m betting that it’s called “All Summer in a Day.”

>>> The kid is having a Halloween party. They play the game where everybody sits in a circle in the dark, passing around various raw fruits and vegetables, and other substances, while a story is narrated. For instance, peeled grapes – “These are his eyes…” and all the little girls go “eeewwwww.” Well, it turns out that one of the parents is a psychopath. I’m pretty sure the last line is, “Then some fool turned on the light.”

>>> A little boy named Anthony had the power to make anything happen, anything at all, just by wishing it. All the adults were his terrorized slaves, who had to always agree with him and pretend that everything was just fine. It was a reversal of usual power dynamic between parents and children in real life. But, viewed from another angle, it was an all too realistic picture of what some otherwise perfectly sane parents will do in order to keep the peace. A kid can just wear you down so much, you’ll do anything to placate him and stop the whining, or whatever kind of meltdown they threaten to subject you to. Also, it was an allegory on the relationship of people to God, who was, after all, the omnipotent Being that people were most concerned with, before Anthony came along. What a great story.

>>> A Canticle for Liebowitz is a novel, not a story, and I’m pretty sure I read it early on. I don’t even remember exactly why any more, only that I trust my earlier judgment enough that if I had to pick ten desert island s.f. books today, it would be on the list.

Throat Singers of Tuva

(This was written many years ago, as pre-show publicity, and then my concert notes say, “Huun Huur Tu means Sun Propeller, the way the rays shoot out from a cloud – the visual effect that a friend once pointed to and said “Look, there’s God.” The harmonics are not what I expected. I’d been thinking in terms of the violin, where you touch the string lightly in a certain place and it makes a sound an octave higher – but for the throat singer, the lower voice is a drone, while upper voice moves around.”)

The brilliant physicist Richard Feynman was the youngest member of the team that invented the atomic bomb. He conceptualized the field of nanotechnology as far back as the 1950s, and many years later it was he who figured out and explained to Congress that the Challenger space shuttle exploded because of defective O-rings.

One of the most interesting things about Feynman was his burning ambition to visit Tannu Tuva. As a child, he had collected the country’s wonderful triangular and diamond-shaped stamps depicting feats of horsemanship, wrestling, archery, and hunting, along with foxes, sables, and many other animals. The bureaucratic red tape took years, and Feynman died before he could get to Tuva. He never even got to hear the unique music except on tape, but we have the opportunity to hear and see Huun-Huur-Tu, the Throat Singers of Tuva. They will be at the Boulder Theatre on February 6. A slide show begins at 7 pm and the concert itself at 8.

Tuva consists of a group of high valleys located in the basin of the Upper Yenisei, between Siberia, the Altai Mountains and the Gobi Desert. The forested zones support a reindeer herding and hunting economy; the high forest and meadow zones an economy based on cattle and horses. Dry upland steppes in the south and east pasture several different kinds of herds – sheep, goats, camels, cattle, horses, yaks and reindeer. A 1931 census revealed that 82% of the population were nomadic herders who followed set migratory routes, moving an average of four times a year.

The people of Tuva also engaged in farming, smithery, jewelry making, and stone and wood carving. Chonardash, or carvable stone, is the rare mineral pyrophillite, which is found only on the summit of one mountain, and has to be dug from a depth of several meters. When first excavated it is pliable, but soon afterward becomes hard as iron.

The people of Tuva are from an ethnic group called the Uriankhai, and historically lived in yurts, round felt-covered huts. Their language has thirteen different words to describe horses of various ages, appearance, function and behavior. Traditionally, the heads of small children of both sexes were shaved except for one lock of hair at the front. The most treasured delicacy of the cuisine is fat of lamb’s tail. Several thousand Tuvans live in Mongolia. The actor Maxim Munzuk, who starred in the cult movie Dersu Uzala, is a Tuvan.

The title Ulag Kham means Great Shaman. The shamans or traditional spiritual leaders would attire themselves in complicated, many-layered costumes, ornamented with iron, that weighed over fifty pounds. Inhaling the smoke of a local narcotic grass, they would play the drums until they entered a trance state.

Tuva is rich in such archeological finds as spectacular Scythian bronze and gold sculptures from between 800 BC to 200 BC, including jewelry for horses. In the Hunnic period, the first 500 years of the Christian era, the Tuvans made arrows with oddly shaped tips which caused them to whistle in flight. One of the wonders of Tuva is an eighth-century fortified palace which nearly covers an entire island in the middle of a lake, and no one knows to this day how the stone was transported there

An eccentric Englishman who made it his life’s work to reach the midpoint of each continent and erect monuments there, deemed Saldam, in Tuva, to be smack dab in the middle of Asia, and put up his monument to it in the late 19th century.

As late as 1943, Tannu Tuva was shown in atlases, but after that it disappeared, because in 1944 the nation allegedly asked to join the USSR. This had little to do with the desires of Tuva itself, and a lot to do with the discovery there of massive amounts of uranium, the first such deposits found in the Soviet sphere of influence. Kyzyl, the capital the newly-christened Tuvinskaya, became the Soviet Union’s “Atom City.”

Throat singing, or khoomei, is described as a “marvel of applied physics” in which the singer produces two or even three notes at once. The ancient style of vocalization has its dangers, and may cause a chronic inflammation of the throat that can lead to cancer. According to legend, khoomei began when a monk heard overtones in a waterfall in an acoustically unique canyon in Western Mongolia. A manual on folk arts said of a khoomei singer, “With his lower voice he sings the melody and accompanies it at the same time with a surprisingly pure and tender sound similar to that of the flute.” Other harmonic techniques produce the sounds of birds, flowing water, and the jingling stirrups of a galloping horse.

Richard Leighton wrote, “At first the higher ‘voice’ sounded like a flute, several octaves higher than the fundamental tone. Then came even stranger styles of khoomei, the most bizarre of which was the ‘rattling’ style, which sounded like a long-winded frog.” One explorer reported hearing a native sing in front of his yurt – “He sang in what seemed to be two voices at once, one reminiscent of the homus, a Tuvinian stringed instrument, and the other the mating call of the woodgrouse at dawn in spring.”

The singers of Huun-Huur-Tu accompany themselves with traditional instruments. Their stringed instruments, embellished with carved horse heads, include a vertical fiddle called the igil, a banjolike lute called the doshpulur, and a cello-like bowed instrument called the byzaanchi. They also employ the shaman’s drum and a rattle made from a bull’s scrotum.

For those who get hooked on the lore of this ancient land, more information is available from an organization founded by Richard Feynman.
Friends of Tuva
Box 70021
Pasadena CA 91117

photo courtesy of Ssppeeeeddyy , used under this Creative Commons license

Double Rainbow, End to End

Acid Heroes by Ace Backwords

As a teenager I read several books by Alexander King, and they were a huge influence on my tender psyche. His memoirs formed my concept of what an artist is, and made me decide to grow up to be one. Sure, he was a heroin addict. But he was also the first one to confirm every one of the sneaking suspicions about the world which had been developing in my subconscious. And I wanted to make for myself a life that I could look back on with as much pleasure as King looked back on his.

It’s possible that Acid Heroes could have pretty much the same effect, and ruin a whole new generation of kids. Ruin them, that is, for the purposes of the military-industrial-religious-educational complex.

It’s okay to laugh ruefully at your old hippie self from the pinnacle of middle age, but to totally renounce that earlier, crazier self, as so many have done, is despicable. Ace Backwords has neatly avoided this possibility by remaining crazy, and also by pouring out for our delectation the results of years of psychedelically abetted thought processes.

Ace has been a fixture of Berkeley’s Telegraph Avenue scene for yonks. He used to publish Twisted Image, one of the zine era’s most widely-circulated publications. Cartoonist, musician, and writer, his mission has been to collect and present the art and music of street people. He’s published two other books, Twisted Image and Surviving on the Streets, both from the late lamented Loompanics Unlimited.

Acid Heroes is a druggy book with an anti-drug message; a detailed analysis of the downside of the counterculture which went on to become, in many negative ways, the culture. More than a memoir, it’s almost like being there – too much for comfort, maybe.

Geniuses, who often violate the rules of established society, certainly come to suffer for these deviations in various cruel ways but they are, at least, sustained in their travails by the glory of their brilliant accomplishments.
Alexander King

The Acid Heroes Buy It Page

Acid Heroes on YouTube

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Dry Hustle

Dry Hustle was published in 1977, and over the following 30 years, while Sarah Kernochan made a name for herself as a screenwriter, director, producer, singer, pianist, songwriter, and journalist, her book was on my want list. It turns out to be worth the wait.

Hippie girl Randy comes to NY with her boyfriend, and with, at his request half a pound of cocaine concealed on her person. He calls himself a neurophenomologist, but basically he’s a coke-head. Their plan falls apart, and Randy goes to work as a taxi-dancer. Kristal, a gypsy proficient in the art of getting money from men and giving nothing in return, takes young Randy under her wing.

“The first place you should never have to go is hungry,” Kristal says. Also she says, “I’m pleasingly plump. Anyone doesn’t like it can keep skinny eatin’ shit.”

“A good sadist is hard to find,” Kristal explains, after setting up a top-dollar gig with a man who wants to be abused by Kristal while Randy looks on and jeers. Kristal’s particular area of expertise is the story about why they need to be paid up front, a different story for each man. This poor sucker, like all the others before him, will arrive at the rendezvous to find no dominatrix and no apprentice.

Kristal teaches Randy all the ropes and then some. Money yes, sex no, is the operating principle. But then…. Randy meets a guy who seems to be a shining example of hippiedom, and falls for him like a ton of hashish. But when he and Kristal meet, they immediately recognize each other as master hustlers, and start talking shop. Cody is a motorcyclist in a gang of one, who says, “I don’t need any of the brother shit, just so I can ride a bike.”

Sarah Kernochan is a splendid writer. The Dry Hustle characters were based on a pair of real women she hung out with in the sleaze district of New York. Here is the beautiful description of Kristal eating:

Her eyes were narrowed to slivers, as if she were on top of a mountain facing into a steady powerful wind and she were eating to gain the extra weight needed to stand fast, immutable, immune, impenetrable, against the power.

A long, long time ago, I read that Karen Black would be playing Kristal in the movie. In fact, that’s probably how the book got on my want list in the first place, because Black is a favorite actor. She would have been great, but it never happened. Then Bette Midler was going to play Kristal, and I would have hated that. Kernochan and Glenn Close were school friends – why on earth didn’t Close get this movie made, and play Kristal herself?

Kristal sums up her worldview:

You can fool alla the people alla the time. One at a time. You got to do them one at a time, that’s why it’s a life’s work.

Related:

In A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago (1922), Ben Hecht describes a representative member of an earlier generation of taxi-dancers:

The wise, brazen little virgins who shimmy and toddle, but never pay the fiddler. She’s it. Selling her ankles for a glass of pop and her eyes for a fox trot. Unhuman little piece. A cross between a macaw and a marionette.

Dance Hall Racket with Honey Harlow

A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago (1922) – Ben Hecht

This is probably the first grownup book I ever read, not too long after finishing The Little Engine That Could. In fact, I’m sure it’s the main reason I learned to read. Although the stories were in tiny print, I wanted to know what that tiny print said, because of the pictures.

After a long hiatus, I found the book again, and traced back some of the ways in which I was influenced, as an artist and as a writer, by A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago, this collection of newspaper columns written by Ben Hecht, with art by Herman Rosse. To call that influence profound wouldn’t be an exaggeration.

These vignettes transcend the topical: Hecht wrote for the ages. The preface, by his editor, describes the extraordinary pieces as the fruits of Hecht’s Big Idea -

…the idea that just under the edge of the news as commonly understood, the news often flatly and unimaginatively told, lay life….

It goes on to say that his daily columns “invaded the realm of literature, where in large part, journalism really dwells.” And he produced one of them every day.

Ben Hecht is one of the masters before whom I bow. He proved over and over that you can find a story anywhere, more stories than you’ll ever live long enough to write. He asks a policeman to recall interesting cases, and the policeman modestly demurs, saying he doesn’t really have any. Unless maybe Hecht means something like the man who had a tobacco jar made from a human skull, “and that’s how they found out he killed his wife.”

Hecht could get the essential story out of a person, and divine the defining events of the life. “Life stories are sometimes no longer than a single line–a sentence, even a phrase,” he said. That sounds condescending, doesn’t it? But Werner Erhard said pretty much the same thing. Everyone’s bio can be distilled into one line. “Your life is about……” That’s why geniuses like Hecht write cautionary tales, of people with these cramped, constricted mini-lives–as a way of warning us not to follow their example, if we can possibly help it.

He wrote of the obscure nobodies, trying to fight their way into the light. He saw the atavistic, archaic, and mythic elements beneath the surface of everyday life. He could lay down an atmosphere, like Ridley Scott did for another city in the Bladerunner movie. The urban variety, and the characters Hecht introduced, helped me know how banal my existence was. His reportage set up a template in my head, from which I learned what to look for in a city. It bent me toward wanting to live someplace full of weirdness, which I later did, in Venice, CA. When I went to Chicago, I found it there too. I found it in so many places along the way, because of being taught how to seek it, by this book, at a very young age.

Here’s one way 1001 Afternoons directly affected my life: its writer and illustrator modeled for me a way of assimilating the city that made it bearable. At 20, I spent a lot of time in downtown Buffalo, and thanks to all that Hecht/Chicago imagery that had been planted in my childish head many years before, the metropolis was not as ugly or alienating as it otherwise would have been.

I worked in a 26-story building–just four stories shorter than Rosse’s picture At the end of a wretched day, when everyone else rushed for street level, I’d take the elevator to the top floor and gaze for a while upon the darkening city. I don’t think I’d have had it in me to do this, if not for Hecht and Rosse.

I like the way Hecht would put things in context. For instance, when interviewing a renowned tattoo artist, he learned from the man’s press clippings that–surprise!–this was not a new phenomenon. Back in the late 1890s, skin art had been a wildfire fad among Chicago’s elite. The Americans were “following the lead of New York’s Four Hundred, who followed the lead of London’s most aristocratic circles…” In the early 1920s, when Hecht got around to writing about the tattoo, it was no longer a status symbol, but had become a lower-class kind of thing.

He wasn’t afraid to write experimentally. Except it’s not really an experiment when such a master does it. I wouldn’t hesitate to call this the first gonzo journalism. Although Hecht speaks of himself in the third person, as “the newspaper man,” the approach is unashamedly subjective. His tone could be acerbic, what we might call snarky. His writing has attitude. He certainly combines elements of fact and fiction, with a good deal of embroidery. What he could make, for instance, of a glimpse of a young woman buying a newspaper….

Thoughts from Ben Hecht, while wandering in the rain one night, which is different from daytime rain:

Ideas do not come so easily or so clearly. The ennobling angers which are the emotion of superiority in the iconoclast do not rise so spontaneously. And one does not say “People are this and people are that…”

Hecht listened to and recounted stories from a taxicab driver, an old watchmaker, a manicurist, a Chinese laundry man, a charwoman, a night conductor on the El. He listened to a man who’d traveled all over the world and had nothing to say about it, and a prison guard who says, “They pick me out for the death watch on account I have a way with doomed men.” A death-obsessed young woman. A vendor of roasted chestnuts. A sailor with a wooden leg.

Hecht would hang out with the day laborers waiting to be hired, or check out talent contests in bottom-feeder bars. Sometimes he went to dangerous places and mixed with desperate people. Or he would report on a formal concert in a glittering hall, and note that the admission price was “33 cents, including war tax.” Wonder why he threw that in?

He tells poignant tales from the sales clerk at the 10-cent wedding ring counter, and from the man who won a pig and brought it home to live in a dirt-filled bathtub. He explores the reasons why another man devotes his life to being a juror, and relates the strange and funny saga of the auctioneer’s wife. He conveys the air of bacchanalia in the nightclub that played the blues and catered to race-mixing (remember, this was 1922). He interviews black entertainer Bert Williams about the time Williams found in his dressing room a huge bouquet of flowers from Sarah Bernhardt, and about how Eleanora Duse called him the best artist on the American stage.

In the midst of the city, Hecht managed to meet up with some nomadic Americans or rubber tramps similar to the ones I composed a MySpace page for decades later. All these encounters became part of the furniture of my immature, impressionable brain. There was the snake charmer, the Japanese female impersonator… This was heavy stuff for a little kid who didn’t even have TV. I was warped into a bohemian – by a book.

So, starting young, as a direct result of 1001 Afternoons, I was attracted to mavericks and outcasts. Decades later, this explained why I was fascinated by Alky Bob (who is briefly shown in this movie , occupying a bench on the Venice boardwalk, with the used magazines he sold spread out around him.)

Doll Lady Susan Moscowitz was one whose story I inquired about, following the example of my mentor. She was a boardwalk regular, making her dolls from found scraps, sometimes selling a doll to a tourist. After being widowed once, Susan chose for her second husband a big, strong man who looked like he wouldn’t die any time soon. He became ill with multiple disease processes. He drove his rickety old car around and habitually crashed into things. Living with him became a terrible burden, and then he died, that big, strong man. Susan shook her head over the irony of it, and I knew Ben Hecht was watching and listening from somewhere.

One effect of the book was almost immediate, taking place when I was a kid. I didn’t really hear any cuss words until I was about 14, but had caught on early that there were such words. I remember, as a kid, using “blankety blank” as a substitute for the cuss words of which I was still innocent. That’s a nerd story if I ever heard one.

I see that familiarity with Hecht’s perception filters contributed to my cynicism. He writes of a woman who

…belongs to the type that becomes charitable around Christmas time. She makes a glowing pretense of aiding the poor…she regards the poor as a sort of social and spiritual asset . They afford her the double opportunity of appearing in the eyes of her neighbors as a magnanimous soul and of doing something which reflects great credit upon her character.

In the piece titled “Nirvana,” he writes of one of the

wise, brazen little virgins who shimmy and toddle, but never pay the fiddler. She’s it. Selling her ankles for a glass of pop and her eyes for a fox trot. Unhuman little piece. A cross between a macaw and a marionette.

He reproduces quite a lot of dialogue from a flapper, and now I realize, all over again, why Inserts is a great movie. Because this piece of writing by Ben Hecht was lodged somewhere in my subconscious, I recognized the character Harlene as authentic.

In one piece, a mother is in a courtroom, trying to keep her baby quiet, waiting to know if her older daughter will be charged with prostitution. In another, a woman’s children are taken away by the juvenile authorities, because when her husband died she spent the insurance money on a big funeral for him. Thanks to Hecht, I was sensitized to stuff like this early on, and I can see the results in the things I wrote in college. I’m sure it wasn’t conscious at the time, but looking back, the influence is plain as day.

About an event that happened at lunch with author Sherwood Anderson, Hecht tells a story so strange, you wonder if they clashed over who got the material to use. Hecht must have been tempted to make it into a screenplay. He writes about the magic of a used book shop on a rainy day. He talks about a book scout finding a 30 cent book that turns out to be worth $150, a 75 cent book that fetches $200. Fifty years later I became a book scout and racked up some amazing finds, but nothing that impressive.

“Ill-Humoresque” contains his reflections on a beggar, the same kind of mental exercise I went through so often when I lived in a community full of mendicants. There’s a great exegesis of the psychology of panhandlers and the citizens who donate dimes to them. This is what is meant by the examined life

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A Great Mystery: the Tattoo
Ben Hecht and Bill Haywood

The Golden Age

The golden age of Scene Magazine, that is–namely, when I was editor. (No offense to any former or subsequent Scene editors. Of course it was the golden age – it was the only one I knew about! It was also, in some ways, harrowing beyond words.)

This is one of my very ultimate favorite biographical photos. There’s me, graphics guy Doug Shald*, and behind the camera was Scene publisher Mike Mockler, who came back from somewhere and caught us slacking.

In Old Town, Fort Collins, Colorado, this funky labyrinthine complex of retail spaces was formerly known as the Clifton Building. Over the years it has housed dozens of alternative ventures: shops, therapists, publications, eateries, workshops, studios, organizations, etc. At this time, the open-air hallways had been covered over with scavenged roofs that used to be on bus stop shelters. The city got rid of them and the owner’s sons recycled them here, to keep the rain and snow off us.

* Also, percussionist

Toyer by Gardner McKay

If you think a dreamboat ex-actor from a mediocre TV series can’t write a good book, this one will make you think again. Toyer starts with a portrait of LA as evocative, in its own way, as Ridley Scott’s vision of the city in Bladerunner.

Toyer is the name given by the press to a felonious psychopath who has mutilated a dozen women. He doesn’t kill them, he just de-activates them. An impressive scene is the verbal sparring between Toyer and one of his proposed victims. There’s a moment when he says, “Your roommate’s not coming home,” and everything changes.

Toyer’s bizarre mission is complicated by the fact that the at-large killer offers to write his memoirs and let his share of the profits go to his victims. His avenging archenemy is a doctor with a psyche as convoluted and off-kilter as his own. Finally, when he agrees to meet her for a therapeutic talk, she takes along a scalpel, planning to kill rather than counsel him. On a dark night she parks at Venice beach and walks out into the sand to confront Toyer…

Gardner McKay has more than the ability to simply write a story. Lovely lines keep coming up – “It rains so rarely, that it rains without knowing how.” There’s great, almost throwaway, stuff about things like the advantages of Catholicism to the bereaved. And we have here the best ever use of a cat in a suspense story, proving that even the most mawkish, overdone cliché can still be redeemed and made art.

The details of haunting loss in a life, he’s good on that. And he reveals perhaps a bit too much about how men think, and more than a man ought to know about how women think. It’s not only that a man gets so into the mind of a woman, but that anybody gets so into the mind of anybody. With all this intelligence, perception and wicked black humor, McKay must have been a scary man to know.

One of the characters is up for a part in an 8-hour cable TV version of Justine – from the Lawrence Durrell book – for that I love the author. Another character reflects that by his age, Rupert Brooke had already died. I love him for that, for even knowing who Rupert Brook was.

The author is as interesting as the novel he wrote: the impossibly handsome actor who starred as Captain Adam Troy in the TV series Adventures in Paradise. Amidst a very strenuous life filled with physically demanding pursuits carried out all over the world, he studied journalism, won awards for writing plays, and gained some fame as a photographer and sculptor. Aside from Toyer, McKay wrote other novels and a biography. And he sure knew Hollywood.

The best way to experience this book, and I wouldn’t lie to you about a thing like this, is to listen to the Brilliance Corp. audiotape, because the novel is read by its author. He has a quirk of pausing between words you wouldn’t expect. He doesn’t try to read the female characters’ lines in a femmy way, and it works just fine. Damn, he’s good. If you possibly can manage it, do yourself a favor and listen to the story. Not while driving, or in the midst of other distractions. Just settle down in a comfortable place, slip on the headphones, and listen.

Kidd of Speed

Free-lance archaeologist Elena in the field

For so many reasons, this gets my vote for all-round greatest website. Virtually join Elena’s motorcycle tours of Chernobyl, old battlefields, and other unbeauty spots. She also writes, for instance, a series of reminiscences from Gulag survivors. Oh, please just go there. You must discover Elena’s world for yourself.

First, I got to thank all who support my “Ghost Town” story. Inspite of all dirt that our officials pouring, story is still on and keep showing people the tragedy of Chernobyl. click here for entering a “Ghost Town”, you will see Chernobyl with my eyes.

BIKERS’ PAGE

kawasaki big ninja, ZZR-1100 (ZX-11) is also known as “big Zed” or “eleven”.

Kidd of Speed, one of the Russians my government tried to teach me to hate.

This days people forget their history, ask anyone in downtown where is bunkers, they don’t have no idea what is bunkers. They can only show pubs and I can show both bunkers and pub.