Goodbye, Dave Brockie

Dave Brockie, during his stint with Virginia Beach Police Department

Suddenly today, there were a bunch of hits here, which is unusual. When I tracked them back to the source, it was an article about the death of David Brockie, founder of Death Piggy, and later, GWAR. Sadness.

I'd pretty much left Richmond by the time GWAR came about, but always enjoyed Death Piggy more. So much so, that 30 years after dancing to their manic music, it seemed important to post about their place in the history of punk, the post which is getting all the hits now, apparently because of the Death Piggy image I posted then and there, and here:

David Brockie and I were not friends, and he wouldn't remember me, but he influenced who I became. The random hilarity of Death Piggy, the utter freedom expressed by a band who could get up and play a song consisting entirely of the words "No prob dude," the refusal to plummet into the pitfalls of many a hardcore band (brick-headed hate, intoxicated inability to perform, and maybe worst of all, sanctimonious preachiness), and the commitment to just having fun stuck with me.

The internet, especially those cul-de-nut-sacs where know-it-all critics lurk, is full of references to the ridiculousness of Death Piggy, but without much appreciation of what a gift it was. They use terms like "Silly Core," and treat Death Piggy as a joke precursor to GWAR, which of course is the opposite of what really happened; GWAR was the Death Piggy sideshow that took over. That Death Piggy did not depend on spike-studded leather or huge mohawks to express their hardcore punkness did not mean that they could not thrash out noise with the best of 'em.

Dave Brockie was a leader in the Richmond punk scene because he did not act like a leader. He didn't give a shit how you danced when they played. He did not write lyrics preaching a Message (a Mess, maybe, but that's another thing entirely). He rode the GWAR waves, but as far as I can tell, did not become an insufferable asshole. He was a self-mocking artist. His "time waster" posts (on some site I cannot re-find now) would show up every so often as I surfed the net--one of my favorites was a screed about art in Richmond, especially the Lady Diana Mural and the Bojangles statue, which he correctly recognized as a racist city's backhanded insult, tucked away off the main (white people) drag and appearing to have been literally slapped together out of shit.

It's sad to lose a creative force. It's a loss to have a rebel die. Personal friend or not, I'm pretty sad. Maybe these lyrics, from the first Death Piggy release, will help:

BATHTUB IN SPACE (by Death Piggy)

I tried to get out, I tried to dry off
But when I got out it called my bluff
Bathtub in space, bathtub in space
Once you get in what a difference you make

I went up in space, I've given up hope
When I got out I slipped on the soap
Bathtub in space, bathtub in space
Bathtub in space what a difference it'll make

We're all in bathtubs, given up hope
What's that mean but soap on a rope

Bathtub in space, high above earth
You know I'm covered in cosmic dirt
Bathtub in space, bathtub in space
Once you get in what a difference it'll make



Time for a nice long soak.

One Love Loop

Truth be told, it was just the odds catching up, I guess, but yesterday it felt like a spell was broken. For the past few laps around the sun, I've found out about concerts right after they happen. I'd be listening to Camper Van Beethoven one day when the computer was handy, I'd look up their tour dates, and see that they'd been in Seattle the night before. D'oh! At one point which I will memorialize as El Tiempo de Los Losses, I missed Los Lobos and Los Lonely Boys in rapid succession, and then later the 20th Anniversary Lobos tour for Kiko, one of my favorite albums ever. Fucking D'oh.

This week, I looked up them and a bunch of other bands, because I had a hankering to see some music. Luckily, I hadn't just missed the Hackensaw Boys or some other band I've been waiting to hear for years. On the other hand, there was nothing going on that I wanted to hear.

So I went with the flow, which led me through the garden for a while, and then into the garage, where I turned on KAOS and looked for something to carve. As Chef Moss laid down the reggae beat, I picked up a piece of milo wood that I've probably had for 15 years. It's a little sapwood scrap, chainsawed flat on two sides, no bigger than my hand. The reason I kept it is that it has this nice teardrop hole through it, and because it has a strong resemblance to certain Hawaiian ki'i (tiki). Strong enough that maybe that's why I never laid blade to it.

Yesterday, though, I picked it up and saw something completely different, and I sat and carved while the music played and the ripe sun shone softly.

Then I thought I heard the DJ say something about Mike Love and Paula Fuga being in town. KAOS being a friendly community station, I called in and found out that yeah, they were playing in a few hours at the Olympia Ballroom. Touring as a trio this time around, I've been listening to them as Dubkonscious since 2005 or so, when I was mapping a Kona village with two other guys who played in the band. For years since, CDs of their two performances on University of Hawai'i's Monday Night Live show (on KTUH, another friendly community station) have traveled with me all over.

So getting to see them was incredible. It was a good (and not crowded) crowd, there to listen and dance. Paula's voice was beautiful and her style, just like it is in Dubkonscious and her solo album Lilikoi, is strong and individual. Mike Love's voice spoke in words, whistles and beyond (including a killer horn riff with no horn), while his hands played and thumped the guitar. Which is enough for most people, but he was busy with both feet making loops and adding effects, affecting several additional players up on stage. Sorry to say, I don't even know if percussionist and non-virtual trio member Sam Ites was in Dubkonscious back when, but now his beats and vocals transformed the duo into something much more.

During their break, I picked up a Dubkonscious album, and talked to Paula and Mike for a while. Actually, I got them to sign the first KTUH disk, and found out that they don't have the second one, so I can burn one for them. I think they were happy to see a disk (the Kona-mapping bass-player's handwriting on it) from so far back, and know that a person has been listening to the whole time. Paula told me that the guy who made the CD for me now lives in Washington!

Maybe there's nothing special, and it really was bound to happen that I'd find out about a concert before it happened, but I'm not gonna look at it that way. As I sat and carved that wood, looping around the hole, the spell broke and the flow was restored. The music played and looped, a recording from years away circled back to find it's singers, and I found an old friend living in the NW. I'm gonna be all non-sciency and think that this is One Love at work.

Dance, Punk, Dance!

Hey, there I am! Not doing the monster mosh. Photo by Cindy Hicks.

Think about punk rock, and what comes to mind? Many Americans immediately imagine spiked leather jackets and giant mohawks, gothily made-up girls with safety pins through their lips.

Yeah, there were some striking visuals among punks before everyone else started dying hair and piercing faces, but this vision stems mostly from TV characters in the costume and make-up peoples' recollections of a visit to London in 1979. As an old fart who was a punk in the US a few years later, what I remember more than the outfits is the dancing.
Dancing, punk rock? Not an association that jetes to mind (other than among Anglophiles who remember the Pogo, Britannia's silliest dance craze), but the chief entertainment while watching five bands play three chords and scream for hours was dancing. Here's what I remember about that, illustrated with photos by Cindy Hicks, who was there recording this display. (See more of her work here.)

Some people reading this are now realizing, "Oh yeah, punks do love the mosh pit," but those people are almost as idiotic as the ones who think all punks look like The Exploited™ and dance the Pogo. I don't know who started saying "mosh," but it wasn't punks in the early 1980s. We slammed and skanked and thrashed, but we did not mosh. Come to think of it, though, it always was in that open floor right below the band called the "pit."

 

Counterclockwise skankin, as per Coriolis. Photo by Cindy Hicks.

Punks love to believe that they are non-conformist, but within their milieu, they follow some rules. One is that once people started dancing--as opposed to surging, jostling, shoving, and flailing--a big counter-clockwise gyre developed in the pit. Round and round, sucking people in like a whirlpool, then flinging them out like a centrifuge when their will or body became too weak to contribute. When a couple of people started skanking around, the crowd would part, avoiding what was basically like drunk speed skaters on a really small track.
Sometimes, dancers linked elbows or threw arms around each other's shoulders and formed a pair that would fly round the ring. Now and then, a pair became three or four or more, a giant second hand sweeping round, clearing the floor. From time to time, an eddy would break out of the main circle, with to people doing a do-si-do, maybe swing their partners round and round. 

Part of me is tempted to get all crictiquely about the square dance maneuvers that occurred in these cyclones, to infer the roots of '90s Americana or the perseverance of folk dance traditions, but really it was just goofy fun. Kinda like when someone would take center floor and do an inept break dance (we hated disco and contributed to its death, but something about the electric boogaloo proved fascinating to punks).

The end of a long dive, photo by Cindy Hicks.

But we didn't just copy white people of yesteryear and black people of our own time. I'd like to think that we invented (or perfected) the stage dive. Partly an adaptation and survival of the fittest, stage-dives also exhibited aspects of mating displays and initiation rites. Sometimes, the crowd pushing band-ward would barf someone up on stage, and the only way back was to dive in an display of anarchic self-policing (no bouncers required). Or it might be that guy hoping that girl would think he was cool, or just craved attention and a thrill. Some would just lean back (their trust rewarded for the most part), but there was a lot to be said for the flying leap onto a sea of hands.

Or maybe, through a couple of people and onto the floor. I'll totally admit that I misjudged a few. The photo above is me diving into a too-sparse crowd. Even though I aimed for Andy, who I knew to be stout, I'd flown across a lot of air and gravity threw me down. I tried it again in Denver at a DK show, thinking the sparse crowd would be friendly like in Richmond, but they failed me and I got a concussion. got a concussion. got a concussion. got..oh yeah..I said that. 

Recovering from a dive,...or break-dancing. Photo by Cindy Hicks.

Part of the magic of the stage dive (to an anthropologist, anyway) is the transgression of the band's priestly precinct on stage. Or more like it, a small scene like Richmond would not tolerate a prima donna too high and mighty to share the stage with a sweaty non-musician. Sometimes people danced on stage and leaned into the mike, more people watching them than the band. Othertimes, a crowd just surged into singerspace, sometimes resulting in reverse stage dives, pressure building til someone is ejaculated onto the stage. That person might turn around and dive back in, or nonchalantly hang out on stage, maybe just talking to somebody with his back turned to the band. But I guess that doesn't count as dancing.

Photo by Cindy Hicks. See it at Propiratzi's Flickr feed.

Or the interest might suddenly focus on the pit's center, a vortex would form, and people would be sucked into a giant pile-up. Looking up from the bottom, I'd hate to see the fat guy coming, but I never heard of (or heard) any broken ribs. Mostly it was a boy thing. Girls joined the dance circle a lot, but were mostly smart enough to back toward the walls when a critical mass of testosterone got to just push-shoving and kick-thrashing. Not coincidentally, I think, most of the archival shots of dance action I've been able to find are from the girls in that crowd.. History thanks you, women.

Some of the wildest shots, I think, involve guys who were not really part of the scene. Rarelier as time went by, rednecks would show up trying to pick a fight, but were mostly stymied. More often, military guys would come, looking to cut loose and enjoy some slam dancing, maybe get one of those punk girls. And if the girls were stand-offish, maybe punch a few of those rotten commie punk boys. (Or, sometimes, get sucked into the vortex and spend their discharge check on a guitar.)

Plenty of punk bands would stop playing when things got out of hand. Fights happened, but I remember bands singling out violent assholes for derision until they just walked away. Pretty much anything else, you could cut loose without sanction or embarrassment. Even mock violence, like the 'chicken fights' (typically girl riding on a boy, facing off with another such team) or, uh, GWAR.

Unfortunately, I have no photos of some of the dance moves that might last only one night. If the ilk of Cliff did it ("Hey Dobey, let's walk funny and start a new trend"), then people would copy for a while. Honor Role had some song where we'd do the Man from Penis dance to some song (maybe it was called "Man from Penis,"..or Venus,…but I'm a blogger not a historian, Jim), which is this: palms together above the head, moving them up and down while we high-knee circled at a moderate to slow pace. There may have been head-bobbing.

As with most of the punk posts, I keep coming back to this: the Richmond scene in those days felt like freedom. Dancing was a huge part of that. Swing your arms with abandon, blow off steam. Create and clown. Glory in the freedom to dance without giving a shit what it looks like or what people will think.

Cannabis Envy

The estate of Mr. Peter McIntosh is reportedly in talks with the State of Washington regarding advertising, Colorado having already inked a deal with the estate of John Denver.

By now, many people have learned, then forgotten, and then totally found out again that voters have legalized marijuana for recreational use in Colorado and Washington (the state, not DC, where congressional overlords will not stand for it). Meanwhile, in the 'lower' 48, everyone else is either bemoaning the collapse of American morality or making travel plans. But we don't need the (church) ladies crying 'cause the story's sad, oh no, 'cause the Rocky Mountain Way is better than the way we had.

Incidentally, the big media news--John (Deutschendorf) Denver fans, every one of 'em, now that Hunter Thompson is gone--all chimed in with "Rocky Mountain High" repartee, missing the much cooler Walsh song for the most part, and coming up empty for Washington. Me too, to be honest. [Although I do think that when it comes time to promote Amsterdam on the Puget, we might want to talk with the Hendrix family about licensing "Are You Experienced?" (wink-wink) for the tourism campaign.]

Smoke pot and you could be this cool!

"Why the obsession with advertising, dude?" I know that's what you're asking. I guess all I can say is that the deal in WA is that yes, it becomes legal (if the federales don't invade), but only in a way subject to regulation, licensing, and taxes. The State won't want to highlight this argument except in retrospect after it has come true, but they finally bought the argument that every stoner for decades has proposed: "Make it legal, slap a tax on it, and kiss your budget woes goodbye." Well wake up, dude, 'cause your dream just came true. Oh, but your dealer is still illegal, and you may not find a store open when you want it, Midnight Toker. [Steve Miller's reference comes in halfway between Denver and Walsh on the official coolness scale, although I personally like the song because my given name happens to be "Space Cowboy."]

But the rest of the country isn't worried about NW stoners having to go to the man to get their weed. A lot of them are plain envious. I was in Oregon this week, and kept hearing people talking about it approvingly, from the guitar duo performing at a brewpub (not such a surprise, even though they kinda had narc haircuts) to a couple of 50-something women. Oregon got their own vote on the subject, and failed, making many of its people green with envy when they gaze across the river. 

One thing that wagging tongues say is that ending reefer Prohibition should tamp down the madness that goes with it. Legal products don't require gangsters or cartels, the logic goes. Unfortunately, we left it illegal for so long that said criminals are entrenched and may decide to corner the legal market (or at least lobby to outsource production) or branch out into other criminal lines of work, like expanding the kidnapping business into US territory. Who knows?

So I guess that's another reason I look at this economically; it's more predictable. Washington and Colorado, as early adopters, have a head start on the money to be made by honest citizens (as well as corporations). Washington's initiative was supposedly crafted to avoid any hint of interstate commerce or anything that would make the feds clamp down,...other than the "We just legalized a Schedule 1 drug prohibited by federal law," aspect, of course. 

But until the clampdown those nice ladies from Oregonian might pay us a visit. There is a sizable 'respectable underground' in this country that would like to smoke pot without worrying about it, and I suspect that there will a pronounced up-tick in people planning trips here to, uh, go salmon fishing, or sailing, or skiing, or hiking, or all those other things that are so fun to do while stoned.

Both Colorado and Washington have outdoors-oriented tourism sectors, which are a good fit with ganja tourism, but other businesses should gain as well. The Seattle music scene stands to become appreciated once more. Excellent craft breweries, wineries, and coffee houses provide models for profitable new revenue streams. Both states boast, I am sure, goodly numbers of professionals who grow very high quality product, as well as legal but struggling farmers who may do very well turning out mass quantities of commodity pot. It will be very interesting to see what niches and markets emerge as hidden talents emerge from the shadows.

So for the time being, only a couple of states have legalized this extremely popular, US-made, un-subsidized, herb. Even if they do not become tourism magnets, Colorado and Washington stand to gain by replacing court and incarceration expenditures with tax and fee revenue. I think there are 15 or so states with legalized 'medical' marijuana, as WA and CO had settled for until this week. [To all the critics who said that was just a sneaky way to legalize pot for recreation, who warned that this medicine was a gateway drug to, uh, well just to more pot--you were right!] The point is that Washington and Colorado might want to consolidate their positions before other states jump on the bandwagon.

Speaking of which, there's always the possibility of national action. I would think that the Republicans in the US House of Representatives would take notice of what looks like a win-win:

• Legalized pot could be taxed, and the Speaker could act like it's not really a new tax
• (And besides, it would be a greater burden on liberals than on the GOP, as long as you're not counting the wastrel scions)
• Supporting legalization might just bring the Libertarians back into the fold
• It might just work to have liberals lazy and happy
• In 4-6 years the GOP could claim credit for the whole idea if it works. 

In the meantime, Washington and Colorado will have fun and maybe reap the benefits of liberaltarian policy. The Tea Party will rail against the Wrong plant-based intoxicant and the socialists who smoke it, while grandmas fret about what is happening to the world. The general public might repeat the "Rocky Mountain High" quip, but mostly just won't care. A few (million) will start making travel plans...

Procession of the Trombones

A loop-de-loop anglerfish trombone.

One of my favorite parts of the procession is the brass. I take vicarious pride in the fact that our little town can marshal several marching bands with horns. It says something about a place that its people have the community spirit to band together and play in a parade without being in high school or even a uniform, necessarily. At least, not the kind of uniform most people think of for marching bands. Olympians walk to many drummers in bands of butterflies and fish. My favorite this year were the anglerfish, a creature who has appeared in many forms in every Procession I've witnessed. 


Besides the benthic headgear, they featured a trombone. The weird and wonderful trombone. Valves, trombonists don't need no stinking valves (although that too can be arranged), they slide right in to everything from classic orchestral maneuvers to burlesque innuendo and of course, the comedic wa-wa-wa-waaaaaah.


My fascination with this instrument goes back to early childhood, discovering the odd case in the attic in which lay my dad's high school horn. I never did learn to play it, but over the years the yellow glow of the bell and the miraculous versatility of the slide captured my imagination. Not enough to get me to follow in his marching band footsteps, but definitely sufficient to fixate on trombones in the sea of brass. For years, my favorite record of his was the one with "76 Trombones;" I'd listen, charged up, imagining rank upon rank of trombone.


There's something in the slide. Not pushing buttons like on those other horns, but exercising exquisite touch to hit the right notes, capable of being a little off if that's what works; like Hawaiians slacking the keys of their guitars the trombonist can expand what the horn can do. The flow from one note to another can roll smoothly, the air keeps flowing if the player keeps blowing, hills instead of steps. Liquid languidity is possible.


Or rollicking. Laughing. Outright craziness. There was this guy who would appear at punk rock shows in Richmond in the early '80s, trombone at the ready, jumping up on stage and unleashing manic solos. Trombone players tend to be the interesting ones even when they are not crazy, or at least that's how I imagine them. The guy willing to learn how to master the slide and take up the instrument for which so few songs are written must have something driving him other than a desire for acclaim and groupies. 


So here's to you, trombone players of the world. I salute you, especially when you ply your trade with an anglerfish on your head.

The Other White Album

There will be no image for this post. Imagine an old-school album cover, a canvas of slightly over one gross of square inches where record companies could visually present their product. If this worked, or if dumb luck smiled up a string of hits, then the band could do a Concept Album, complete with specially commissioned airbrush art.


So imagine a young punk's joy at flipping through a bin at Plan 9 and eyeing an album with no damn art at all. Imagine your fingertips treading to the Beatles' "White Album"  (blessed occular nerve relief from Sgt. Pepper's Gaudy Arts Club Band).

Now imagine that you are some lame old longhair, and that in another section of the store is some punk kid looking at a real white album. No words. No fucking advertisement for the band, and sure as shit no critics coming along later and using this marring of White Album-ness pretentiously, as in "Only the original vinyl was thus embossed. Other pressings are worthless...except for the music I suppose."


Furthermore, this blank expanse of non-ink contained within it more or less the legendary album (even when the Sex Pistols were only stale, not historic) "Never Mind the Bollocks." The punk boy knew this because the counter guy said so. So it was a bootleg! Young punk boy didn't know much, but he did know that buying a legit album would just hand money to wankers. Neither he nor the record store, I think, ever figured out that selling certain albums in unmarked sleeves would incentivise insecure customers' purchases.


The vinyl did not disappoint. Banter not on Bollocks (he did know that meant balls or something) appeared on this disc, and at least one song from the album (that grand old abortion ballad "Bodies") had gone missing. The quality was probably shittier than the commercially real thing. Most of the songs sound different, and young punk boy convinced himself that he had real recordings of the band, and not the over-produced crap in the House of McCLaren album cover. 

And so said album was not hidden in shame, culled, nor abused so badly that abandonment remained the only course. This week, that punk boy (now incapable of a mohawk) rearranged some things in the garage, got the phono simultaneously spinning and plugged in and not scratching the hell out of records. It had been two out of three the last time, but that was a crazy set-up on a table saw. Now turntable rested on a heavy slab o walnut on foam strips atop a surprisingly vibration-free freezer, an elegant blend of opportunism and mechanical physics.


He listened with dulleder ears than he had when this smudged and patina'd album was new, when digital recording was unheard of, groove ruled, and once you done scratched, ain't no going back. He cleaned the vinyl, and it looked pretty good, but antiquity popped, wowed, and fluttered through each side. Which was intense, in that fuzzed up preservation of something rough to begin with adheres to the ethos more than a digitally manipulated (is that a redundant phrase?) version available at vendors these days. 

Alas, it was also untense, slack and slow by the hardcore that supplanted American punks' British fadscination by 1980. Johnny Rotten's relentless tooth-hamming remained audible, sneering clearly after all these years while the bass was hard to pick up anymore, but maybe that just what happens to punk boy's ears after standing in front of PA stacks too much as a kid. 

Even if he cannot hear it right, the Sex Pistols canon is preserved, historicized (I've never seen so many notes on a wikipedian entry: 238 as of today), and curated. The Sex Pistols refused canonization by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame a few years ago, but they do still manage to cash in on their old man music. Meanwhile, God saved the Queen for a 50th and now 60th year of her reign, while Lydon still mugs for the camera for a few quid. 


Lost luster and ironic subsequencies didn't ruin the listen, though, and when the arm swung back to it's resting place and the turntable drifted to a stop, punk boy was a little less old man than he'd been half an hour earlier.

Card Carrying Member of KAOS

I written about radio before, and am starting to suspect that it's going to be an altar in the temple of my curmudgeonhood. At the coming of aural autonomy, my preference was cassettes, probably because they let me record other peoples' music (piracy was more labor intensive in those days, but for every hardcore 7-inch 33, there were an ungodly number of cassette copies), and because radio offerings sucked at the time.


Now, that's different. Partly because the same social outcasts' flat out refusal to be told No led to a wave of low power stations, many of which fizzled, but enough of which survived to get their DNA on the air, where it has replicated ever since. The airwaves of 1980s Virginia, badly infected with commercials or stuck in chronic classical, are banished to space, where aliens hearing them may decide that there are no signs of intelligent life.


Living in Olympia and working statewide, the radioscape around me offers not just a pretty diverse genus of public stations, but community operated broadcasts. From Spokane to Skagit, on down the road through Everett, Seattle, Olympia and Portland, volunteers give voice to their place. People playing things you'll never hear elsewhere, people getting a chance to express or explore something that matters mostly in that small patch of earth. To have a station that adds diversity to their community invigorates culture and Culture. 

The local identity and grass-roots operation of most community stations are also, I think, important for democracy. Radio broadcasts reach people beyond wi-fi hubs and fiber umbilicals. Transmitters not owned by Clear Channel can air views unfettered by corporate mores. And if the time comes, know that the revolution will be televised, but only in between commercials, and you'll get better news on the radio. Oddly, the elder media spent much time this Arab Spring fawning on the democracy facebook and youtube, but radio remains and effective and cheap tool for freedom lovers.


Not free, though. Which is why I am a member at KAOS, Olympia community radio. Because it's not just that the call letters are hands down the best in the nation (sorry, KBOO), or the discounts kicked back at me from local bidnesses--I really do want to make sure community radio stays on the air.


KAOS brings us Democracy Now and other shows that would not be broadcast otherwise. They have not just Native News, but a great 4 hour block of native programming on Sundays; is there another station like that? And I cannot count the number of times I've cooked dinner listening happily to View from the Shore or Chant Down Babylon. The last thing I hear driving away from Olympia is usually static-scratched Amy Goodman. I tune in at random other times and get introduced to music from around the world, some of it so new it's live, but some harvested in the early days, most of it efficacious and restorative. 


So yes, I am proud to be a Card Carrying Member of KAOS. Are you?

My Dirty Secret

Been reading this blog? Or maybe you know me?

Then you may have some ideas of the cartography of my character. Lopsided to the left, borders with the Right and rich fortified. A river of scorn and ire draining a vast watershed of political and economic opinion. Shifting sands and a wandering north pole. Lands of yore and fakelore. Criss-crossed by narrow roads. Occasional lyric naturescapes. Ponds most caustic. Winds that blow on and on without going anywhere, circling back again and again. Rocky harsh frontiers, unwelcoming.


Not long ago, someone spotted a discontinuity, a hint of some unexpected geology underlying the public lands that are this blog. It was in the form of a reference to Marie Antoinette's garden a topic that seems awfully girly and Francophilic to be showing up in these parts.


 
But I am not afraid to love incongruously. Long ago, in the grips of surging testosterone and flagging confidence, it was important to maintain consistency. To stick with the caustic wit without letting down my guard. To steer clear of anything mainstream. To listen not to hippie stuff or new wave fluff, but to be hardcore. 


Then I learned to live for myself instead of an image, and to revel in the land, not the map. 


So I admit to you that this weekend I reveled in the goofy spectacle of Olympia's best parade, the Procession of the Species. This photo is part of that, a troupe of mandolin, banjo, and guitar-playing butterflies singing about caterpillars and love. Punk me would have turned away from this spectacle of hippidiculousness, maybe. But now, I love it. Just some people having fun, celebrating life. I cannot remember their song (simple as it was), but bask in the REMemory, lyrics of "Shiny Happy People" running through my mind in a holey loop.