"He was an old blogger who worked alone out of a Berkeley apartment that overlooked San Francisco’s gate of gold and occasionally he would be helped by his neighbor who had played in nine major league baseball games, so they would discuss the achievements of Mantle, Marris, and Jeeter. The old columnist had gone 57 days without producing a remarkably witty column. The weather for the day was expected to provide the perfect opportunity to play tourist in fog city. It was going to be a Kodachrome day with brilliant sun lighted vistas brimming with saturated colors beckoning for attention from the new Nikon Coolpix camera. Suddenly an amazing and perceptive insight into life appeared and the columnist knew what he had to do."
On Wednesday, May 5, 2010, (AKA cinco de mayo), we traveled to San Francisco to drop a suggestion off at the Beat Museum, because their "el jefe had recently sent an e-mail to the Museum’s electronic posse alerting them to the fact that this summer they would feature items from the contemporary American culture of the Sixties and they were seeking new and exciting ways to generate publicity fomenting interest in their summer plan for enhancing the lure of their tourist attraction destination in fog city.
A bar in Los Angeles had gained a good deal of mainstream media attention by holding an annual writing contest seeking "one good page of bad Hemingway," so it seemed like a no brainer to suggest that the Beat Museum hold a "one good page of bad Kerouac" writing contest.
The young man on duty responded that in the past they had held a Kerouac poetry contest and that after it was finished, they were inundated by calls from unsuccessful contestants who were very curious to know why their entry had not won the competition and who, subsequently, wanted to debate the finality of the choice lest their powers of persuasion could lead to a reconsideration and a revision of the final results.
We picked up a flyer there that says that Al Hinkle (the character of Ed Dunkel in "On the Road" was based on him) will make a personal appearance on June 5, 2010 from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the Menlo Park Library on Alama street in Menlo Park CA.
Since the Hemingway contest, the restaurant, and even the building where the bar in Century City used to be, are all part of Los Angeles history now, the young man at the Museum on Broadway in San Francisco may have had a valid point. He did, however, affirm that he would relay our suggestion along to the boss.
The Bulwar-Litton writing contest is still being held annually, isn’t it? What about the contest for imitations of Raymond Chandler?
Maybe if we go to Netroots Nation, we can compare notes with other attendees and learn what, where, and how to better apply our talent at the (computer) keyboard.
Maybe Rolling Stone magazine would be interested in a story about what it would be like to accompany Berkeley’s gonzo grannie to the Netroots gathering in Las Vegas this summer? As a gonzo journalist she has covered the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, done sky diving, and is a grandmother. She is a grandmother who has attended Malcolm X’s funeral and participated in a newsworthy anti-war (Vietnam) event in Oakland. Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson weren’t the only writers in the gonzo journalism branch of writing; they were just the most famous.
First order of business will be getting some readers to "second the motion" by way of voting in favor of the venture. We’ll have to learn the particulars about that and then we’ll have to contact all our friends, relatives, and yes even enemies and beg them to vote (where are the electronic voting machines that don’t leave a paper trail, when you really need them?) for including the world’s laziest journalist on the roster of this year’s Netroots Nation attendees.
Isn’t this year’s Netroots happening in Las Vegas? Why don’t computer keyboards have a key for a light bulb character which would alert readers to a brillig idea. Well it would if the reader happens to be a Jame Joyce fan.
I can see it all now. A story for Rolling Stone would begin like this: "We were somewhere near Searchlight Nevada in the middle of the desert when the dread and paranoia began to take hold. I’d say: "I feel a bit lighthearted; maybe you should drive while I blog" and I’d use the portable lap top to record the actual sensations: ‘Suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of soul wrenching fearful thoughts and trepidations that looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas.’ Could the BP oil accident kill off the world’s supply of oxygen and bring an end to humanity before the first panel discussion was held?"
Maybe the gonzo granny journalist could say something quotable about the old days when she helped at the inception of People’s Park? "Now, forty years later, you can go up from Aardvark on Telegraph Ave. and look around People’s Park and with the right kind of eyes you can see the high water mark of the Peace movement before it broke up and finally committed the Democrats as well as the Republicans to Bush’s Forever War and the realization that (to paraphrase Vince Lombardi) fighting for oil isn’t everything; it’s the only thing."
It’s a good bet that many of the participants in this year’s Netroots Nation will be men burning in the Nevada desert with the desire to make judgments about BP’s recent oil drilling malfunction. There will be a crying need for some one to promote and disseminate the dissenting point of view by quoting what Aldous Huxley said in the forward to the Perennial Library paperback edition of "Brave New World": "Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean."
If the pristine beaches on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico become a gooey stick mess, rather than waste time on cleaning up the beaches perhaps all that will be needed is for the various members of the conservative religious right’s clergy to promote a temporary dispensation and for them to sanction rolling in the black gold as a kinky new way for married couples to exorcise their conjugal rights?
What’s not for Jann Wenner to love about such an article?
We’ve submitted our suggestion, to the Beat Museum, we’ve come up with a distinctive approach for a pitch to the editors of Rolling Stone magazine, and, if worse comes to worse concerning the possibility that the BP oil spill becomes a ecological equivalent of the China Syndrome end of humanity event, then why not hit the old bank account and continue on from Netroots Nation 2010 to Berlin, Paris, the Isle du Levant, and (if the bank account doesn’t give out first) the underground music scene in Cober Pede?
Help get me started on my way to the Netroots 2010 event and vote here:
www.democracyforamerica.com/netroots_nation_scholarships/828-bob-patterson
On page 70 of Papa Hemingway (Random House hardback edition) A. E. Hotchiner quoted Ernest Hemingway as saying: "The parody is the last refuge of the frustrated writer. Parodies are what you write when you are associate editor of the Harvard Lampoon. . . . The step up from writing parodies is writing on the wall above the urinal."
Now, the disk jockey will play some of Weird Al Yankovic’s songs: "My Bologna," "Another one rides the bus," and "I love rocky road." We have to go see where one can buy some either. Have an "orgy-porgy" type of week.