Gilman

One more music-related memory, and then I'll move on to something else, at least for awhile. Music was and continues to be necessary part of my life. We all have ways of emotionally navigating the fearsome maze of modern culture, and music is the foremost among mine. Getting the hell out of the city and into the woods is another. This is how I draw some sort of spiritual sustenance into a psyche bleached by contact with the hostile non-environment of concrete, greed, and the general rat-in-a-cage strangeness of city and suburban life.

Of course, being infected with modern culture, lately I've taken my music consumption levels too far, so this year one of my goals is to stick to a budget. So far, I've succeeded, but it is only February. My willpower will be tested.

As I mentioned in the last post, I spent much of the late eighties at Gilman St., aka the Gilman Street Project, in Berkeley. It was basically a youth club where like-minded individuals would regularly gather and experience wave after wave of punk and hardcore bands. Most of the bands that played regularly enough to almost be considered "house bands" were of the humorous variety. Once, the singer from an out of town band, Slapshot, complained that the crowd was like "Romper Room". He didn't get it. Punk is often viewed as being somewhat macho and edgy, so we tipped that perception on its head and acted like a bunch of sugar-addled little kids. Most of the time, anyway.

Here's a photo of the crowd at an Isocracy show, probably from 1987. Isocracy's schtick was to raid dumpsters before their performances, and then rain trash down on the heads of the audience. This was huge fun. We also sometimes had leap-frog pits, rode bigwheels, and in general subverted the public perception of what punk was supposed to be about. For us, it was about rebellion, fun, and served to help develop a social consciousness that I still retain today.

I'm the one with the backwards hat. I think veteran punk photographer Murray Bowles took this. I could be wrong though. Like the photo in the last post, I grabbed this photo from Facebook. This one was posted by my friend Devon, who was my friend back in the eighties, and is still my friend today.

Musical Eighties

Starting in 1983, I started going to a lot of metal shows in small venues, and about a year later, discovered punk. Currently, I thoroughly document my musical obsessions, but back then, I was just soaking it all in and throwing myself around in a never ending series of pits (I've always hated the word "mosh", used to describe this singular form of dancing - why is it that I'm always reluctant to use new words?). Some of my friends from that time regularly cough up detritus from the past on Facebook, which leads me to believe that they were a lot more organized that I was, or at least a lot more obsessed with the past.

I was going to write about something entirely different today, but my old friend Wayne, who was pretty much my constant companion in those days, pointed out my presence in the following photo, posted on Facebook by local guru Ron Quintana (editor of the infamous Metal Mania 'zine, among other things).

That's me in the upper left, wearing a D.I.Y. Exodus shirt and facing away from the camera. I think I silkscreened that in a high school art class, although I might have done it at home. I made a few shirts this way, and this was far from the best. I think the Celtic Frost and Acid shirts I made were much better. The Celtic Frost shirt is now part of a quilt I had made a year or two ago.

I'm not even sure what show this was. Our usual haunts were The Stone, Ruthie's Inn, The Farm, New Method, On Broadway, Mabuhay Gardens, and a few others. In the latter half of the eighties, Gilman St. eclipsed the other venues. I could write endlessly about those days, but I'll save that for another time and my other blog.

Let it suffice to say that these were my people during my formative years. In a lot of ways, they still are.

Your Freudian Slip Is Showing

And then there was the time at an elementary school assembly when the third grade teacher, Miss Campbell, mispronounced the name of the fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Schmidt.

Yes, like that.

Middle School Present and Past

Eva's ex-middle school is up at camp this week, with predictable results. For multiple reasons, middle school students always present more behavior problems than elementary school kids, and for some reason, the kids from Eva's old school are more prone to misbehavior than most. To add another layer of difficulty, we didn't have enough cabin leaders to cover the cabins, so three cabins were leaderless overnight.

One boy was reported to be sitting up in bed after bedtime, and not responding to requests to lie down. A boy nearby accused him of trying to scare people. His teacher and I pulled him out of the room and questioned him about it. He said that he felt "weird" and that he thought he might be possessed.

Okay then...

In the end, we decided that he was just feeling anxious about being away from home (he told us he feels that way every time he goes camping), and took him back to bed. That's when he discovered that he didn't have a sleeping bag or pillow. A boy nearby had an extra pillow, and another boy had an extra postage stamp-sized blanket. The teachers this week brought their own supply of extra blankets, so we added a bigger, warmer blanket to the bunk.

In the morning, the boy's sleeping bag turned up in the hands of one of my co-workers. I'm not sure where she found it. Maybe it was in the lost and found. Some kids just seem checked out of reality.

The other overnight issues were more pedestrian, and mostly involved people not shutting up and allowing their classmates to sleep.

This morning, since Scooby, who usually tells stories, is sick, I told the kids a story before breakfast. It was raining, and our usual rainy day spot is slated for demolition and inaccessible, so I told it inside the dining hall amidst the clattering of plates and silverware and tables were set up. It wasn't quite as distracting as I thought it was going to be.

Since we're on the subject of middle school, I guess I'll share a memory of when I was in middle school. The one that pops first into my mind is the time that our universally disliked vice principal, Mr. Boothe, had to put out a locker fire with fire extinguisher. I have no idea who started the fire, but it was grand entertainment watching our unhappy vice principal grimly applying the foam to the flaming textbooks and papers.

My train of thought has arrived at another memory involving Mr. Boothe. A friend and I were called into the office to talk to a couple of policemen who were investigating a nearby residential burglary. We were suspects because we had a paper route in the area (I can't remember now if it was my route or my friend's), and their line of questioning was pretty brainless. It consisted, in part, of showing us items of jewelry and asking if we'd seen them before, as if we'd actually say "yes" if we had. Of course, neither of us were guilty, so we honestly said that we hadn't. Mr. Boothe, jaded drone that he was, acted as if we'd already been tried and convicted, often admonishing us with statements like, "you had better tell the truth now!"

There seems to be a theme to my memories so far. I tended to get into minor trouble a lot, although for some reason school authorities often seemed to think I was a major criminal.

That said, I'm glad that I don't have to supervise a middle school like mine. By my adult standards, we were pretty out of control. At the time, we didn't think twice about how we behaved, and we got away with a lot. There were a lot of drugs and alcohol on campus, not to mention fighting. Perhaps some of those stories will appear here another time.

I have half a mind to drive by my old school, just to see what it looks like today. I'm not sure what the site is used for now.

Memory Month

The sky is blue, and I'm being attacked by a kitten as I try to type. Lately, I've been playing with a free app called Dreamscope, which turns phone photos into "works of art" by running them through various filters. Here's an alternate Brian.

I'm glad I'm not actually being attacked by a kitten who looks like this. That would be horrifying.

AS I mentioned in the previous post, each day this month I'm going to wind back the clock and share a memory. For the most part, it will be whatever memory pops into my head on the given day. Today, I'm remembering the first time I got sent to the principal's office at school. I was in the first grade. I remember waiting in line at the drinking fountain, and getting impatient that the guy in front of me, a redheaded boy named Doug, was taking too long to finish drinking. My solution to this problem was to bite him. We both got dragged to the principal's office. Doug was crying, and I seem to remember being somewhat unrepentant. The principal yelled at both of us for some reason, or that's how I remember anyway. He even mentioned rabies, as if rabies was commonly spread from human to human through bites. This made Doug cry harder.

Looking back on this now, I have to wonder what in the hell the principal was thinking. When a kid is crying because he has just been bitten by some asshole classmate at the drinking fountain, it's not a good idea to scare that kid into thinking that he might also now have rabies. That said, I don't think I broke the skin, so even if I had been foaming at the mouth, Doug would have been safe. I don't remember anything else about the principal, but based on this one memory, it's pretty obvious to me that he wasn't a very good one.

I just looked Doug up online. It seems he lives in Melbourne now. I wonder if he remembers this incident.

Photo Excursion

We spent a windy Sunday driving and walking around Mountain View, taking pictures of places we used to live. Jeanine was born in Mountain View, and I lived in two houses and two apartments there (not at the same time - that would be weird). I got the idea to photograph all of my old addresses after deciding that my writing challenge for February would be to share a random memory each day. I figured that having photographs to go along with some of the posts would be fun. Plus, I was curious to see if any of my previous dwellings looked any different. Of course, now that I've taken these pictures with the intention of writing about them, the memories I'll be sharing are no longer quite random. Also, they're most likely to be of interest to nobody but myself, but I'm writing this for me, not you, so too bad.

We wandered through the downtown area too, stopping in a book store and eating at the crepe place across the street. Downtown Mountain View has a bit of an edge over downtown Campbell (which is our nearest downtown area of any note) because it has two book stores instead of one.

The photo above was taken on the way back. The sky to the north was quite striking this evening.

Skate Party

Months after her last game of the season, Willow finally had her end-of-season soccer party, which included skating at Downtown Ice and receiving a couple of trophies (one for the season, and one for the tournament).

Now, she says her feet hurt, so she's sitting on the couch and watching bad TV while scrolling around on her iPod.

Incomplete Explanation

Sometimes, I get to work and discover abandoned notes written by kids who got caught doing something they shouldn't have been doing. Usually, the notes are apologies, but this one seems to be a mere explanation. Perhaps he was leading up to an apology, but never got a chance to get to that point. I have no idea why this was left unfinished.

Just another of life's little mysteries.

Divine Sunrise

I take too many photos of sunrises and sunsets, but in my defense, each one is different. I've always been drawn toward landscapes and skyscapes, and the evidence is in the photos I choose to share here. Very few of the photos I've posted this month (or last month) have people in them.

Last night, while I was reading Algernon Blackwood's "Pan's Garden" (the book that I pulled a bunch of pressed flowers and leaves from awhile back), I discovered that I'd missed one interesting thing:

It makes me wonder about the past owner(s) of this book. The spaces between the pages have proven to be a cornucopia of strangeness. Taking my cue from Jeanine's quick tracking down of the last quote I'd found wedged in the book, I did a quick online search for this one and discovered this site of quotes by an interesting historical personage known as Father Divine. The Wikipedia entry for Father Divine reveals that cult leader Jim Jones once claimed to be Divine's reincarnation, despite the fact that Jones was 34 years old when Divine died.

Music For Cats

As I was walking around camp last night, I was listening to Cat Power. Turning around suddenly, I discovered that our resident feral cat was following me. The only conclusion possible here is that he wanted to let me know he approved of my musical choice.

Or, he may have wanted me to feed him. Cats tend to think with their stomachs.

Other than that, the night was uneventful. A raccoon was hanging out near the walk-in freezers, and later,a mouse darted across the hub. The kids slept. In the morning, a string of planets was visible, laid out across the sky like some sort of cosmic beaded necklace.

Our new gate has been installed, but the finishing touch of an electronic entry system still remains undone. The old gate is still in place as well.

Corvid Points

Looking to the west this morning, I saw this:

This was my view to the east:

The kids this week are the low-maintenance type, so my night was easy. I walked a couple of miles around camp, and got a little farther in Algernon Blackwood's "Pan's Garden". Life is good.

Back On the Night Shift

This is the campfire currently burning down to ash and memories out in the middle of camp. The campers are in bed, the night is cold, and the moon commands the sky.

I wish I could have gotten a photo of the moonrise earlier. It was huge and orange, but partially veiled by dark clouds, making it look eaten away, like a hastily abandoned peach. The photo wouldn't have been as good as the real thing anyway.

Simply Walking

Today's photo was taken during a walk through the neighborhood. These days, Jeanine can't stray too far from home because she needs to stay close by to help her mom, which means that if we want to go on a walk together, it has to be pretty local. No hiking in the hills for us for the time being, at least not together.

Short Hike

I went on a quick hike at Almaden Quicksilver park this afternoon. Everything was moist and green. By the end of the hike, I was kind of moist too, since it had started raining. The air smelled of freshly-minted oxygen, and the light rain just made things better.

The robins were out in force, and I saw a couple of deer grazing near my chosen entrance. There were a couple of possible Mountain Lion tracks in the mud too, although I'm not 100% sure. I thought I detected a claw mark in front of one of the toe pads, which would indicate canine rather than feline. Other than that one possible claw mark, it looked like Mountain Lion to me.

My Camera Rises From the Dead, Sort Of...

Right after I uploaded the last post, I discovered that Jeanine's camera was having lens issues, which inspired me to once again fiddle with my dead camera, whereupon I found that it had come back to life. The image screen was kind of foggy looking, and I wasn't quite sure if the problem lay in the screen or the lens. Not having a better option, I took it to the show. The pictures came out crappy, so the lens still has some moisture inside it somewhere. At least the camera works though. I'll have to see what I can do about the lens.

The show was excellent. Venom, Inc. are two thirds of the band Venom, plus Tony Dolan (aka Demolition Man) from the band Atomkraft. Venom was my favorite band when I was in the 8th or 9th grade. I became a fan of Atomkraft around then too. I'll do a more detailed write-up on my music blog.

The Approaching Twilight

I took this picture at home, so it doesn't count toward this month's daily challenge of taking a photo somewhere besides home. Hopefully I'll have another photo later, after we return from seeing Venom, Inc. It might be after midnight though. I'll be borrowing Jeanine's little point and shoot camera for the job, since my smaller camera didn't survive its plunge into the creek a week ago. I guess that immersing moist electronics in a bag of rice doesn't always work. It's a shame.

The quote above was found between the pages of the same Algernon Blackwood book that contained the pressed flowers & leaves I posted about last month. I just missed it the first time. I went back for another look because I'm reading it next, and I didn't want to end up fumbling through it for errant, dessicated flora in the middle of the night. Now, I have a small bag full of the former in-between contents of the book, and the book itself is ready to be read.

I find this quote strangely prescient, since it deftly describes the danger of the kind of selfish, small-picture thinking that permeates our society at every level. I'm not saying I agree with nationalism, because I definitely don't, but the idea that our failure to see the big picture will be our undoing is one that I wish more people would understand. My big picture extends to the whole world though, not just one country, whether it be ours or another.

Soon after I posted this picture on Facebook, Jeanine saw it, googled it, and discovered its source: the December 14th, 1922 edition of the New York Times. I can't access the whole article without being a subscriber though, so the context is still unknown to me. See the link here.

Predestination

The unfortunate thing about train tracks is that the traveler has limited options. The destinations are predetermined, and deviating from the set path is always disastrous.

Sunset On the American Dream

I often wonder if our current social climate has reached its nadir, or if we have farther to fall. If we haven't reached our nadir, that means there is someone even more vapid than Sarah Palin waiting in the wings. That's a scary thought. It also means there is someone more narcissistic and crude than Donald Trump our there somewhere. Don't even get me started on the people who take either of them seriously, or on Palin's trainwreck of a family. Shudder. The thought of either of them holding power of any kind makes me want to retch.

To help alleviate the suffering of being exposed to their idiocy, here's a nice picture of a sunset.

Wet Wash

It's a relief to finally have a properly rainy January. While up at camp checking on the nature lab animals today, I was happy to see that a number of dry washes are currently far from dry. Take the one below, for example.

Same Creek, Different Day

I'm off work this week due to our main site being closed. I could have worked our other site, but chose not to. Jeanine and I walked a different stretch of the Los Gatos Creek Trail today, starting at the same place but heading northeast instead of southwest.

We saw some fish carts:

A grumpy Cooper's Hawk:

And trees full of robins, not to mention some crows chasing away another hawk. It alighted at the top of a distant tree and stayed there, like some sort of Christmas tree topper.

On the way back, we stopped at Jamba Juice, and as we descended the steps back to the creek trail, politely declined an offer to smoke weed with a couple of elderly homeless people.

Oh yeah, and we bumped into a teacher who recognized me from camp. That kind of thing happens a lot.