Pancakes

Every few weeks, school starts late, and I have the joy of an extra couple of hours with my youngest kid. For a while now, we've been using that time to head downtown to Darby's for breakfast; it's happened enough that we could call it a Tradition if we wanted. It's a luxury, having this extra time, and being able to spend it sharing coffee (she mostly warms her hands with it, but usually also sneaks a sip) and eating pancakes is a treasure I will not trade for anything.

Sometimes on weekends, we pry her older sister out of bed and head downtown to the diner. Or maybe it's not until afternoon, but that's no problem, because like any real diner, you can order breakfast all day. One time, the music was some rap about pancakes, and we could hear the cooks talking about pancakes (sorry to be repetitive about pancakes, but me and the girls tend to be selective with our terms, and cannot abide flapjacks, hotcakes, and especially flannel-cakes). One of them said, "I guess I eat a pancake about every damn day!" We cracked up, and repeat that phrase often, if not every damn day. Beneath the laughter, we all recognize a purity in the boast: the guy really enjoys having a pancake every day. A humble pancake sticking to your ribs gives you strength to face whatever the day throws at you.

Even a short stack can be too much for a kid, and sometimes there are leftovers. She works her way through methodically, cutting enough to eat and saving the rest of the disk, so there will be a substantial something instead of a pile of syrupy pieces. Usually, the dog is the beneficiary. Only recently, DNA analysis showed that a key difference between domesticated dogs and their wolfy cousins is that dogs can digest carbohydrates, and our hound excels. She gets a stale pancake and prances around for a while, showing off to those crows who sometimes taunt her that she has a delicious pancake, before settling down and gobbling it up.

Sometimes, I cook the pancakes. After years of messing with recipes and bisquick versions, I found a local pancake mix that does the trick best. These days, the youngest daughter mixes it, then I come along to knock out a few more lumps, and we let the batter rest while the skillet heats up. Cast iron is the only acceptable surface for me. Some of my earliest memories are of the thin blue smoke that my grand-dad let rise before flipping. Then watching my dad, him teaching me that watching the bubbles pop led to browned perfection without grand-dads carbonized edging. Dad cooked on an 11.25-inch Griswold skillet that family lore (or at least my recollection) says was given to him when he went away to grad school. With this classic American iron, he could cook anything the lone male physics student was apt to eat (all three meals). I have that skillet now, and continue to cook all kinds of stuff in it, sometimes to the chagrin of my kids...except when it's a pancake day.

For some reason, my recollections (not yet lore) of Dad's last few days focus on pancakes missed. He had a terminal illness--refusing to knuckle under to the "terminal" label for a couple years already--and was having such a hard time we'd scheduled a doctor visit. After some listening to lungs and flipping through charts, the doctor sat down with Dad, Mom, and me, and explained that Dad needed to be admitted to the hospital. I knew, and I think Dad did too, that the unspoken end of that sentence was "to die."

It was mid-morning now, and Dad said he was hungry. Stupidly, I sought permission go out to eat before going in to the hospital. I should have just taken him. But the message from the nurse was something like, "Now, you know we can't let you do that." That special gentle condescension that transforms dead men walking into incompetent children had already kicked in. I should have nodded, walked him out, turned the other way, and escaped to a stack of pancakes, but Mom was also worried about what might happen and still believing that after a day or two of hospitalization, we'd go out for breakfast. I didn't want to take that from her, and besides Dad probably wanted to believe in that too.

Instead of dropping dead over pancakes, he died in a bed surrounded by machines, stuck full of tubes. My aunt did smuggle in one of his favorite meals before the end, but we never got that last moment of freedom, that last stack of pancakes.That that's my big regret is a blessing, but I still wish I'd whisked my parents away and met my sister for a Last Breakfast.

So, on those late-start days, I'll be sitting at a table with my kid, looking out at the street-scape shenanigans of making silverware sculptures while was await the pancakes. Falling behind a little on work doesn't matter. Eating carbs I don't need is not as unhealthy as missing time with my kids. Following hospital protocol but subverting a dying man's wish was a shame. Pancakes are life, and even if you cannot have one every damn day, it's worth sharing a stack with someone you love.

One Seventh

Seven Slices Make a Wheel

Geez. The last two up-to-date posts were depressing, so here I am regressing to nostalgia.

Someday, I'll get around to the post about reinventing the wheel, a popular 20th Century pastime, but for now I' happy just to post a pic of a wheel. Behold yon wagon wheel. Rims of steel (maybe iron) round hub and circumferance of wood (I know not which species).

Look close, and you'll see that the 14 spokes radiate to seven sections of wood, each 51.42857 degrees of a circle. Sure, it would have been easier to go with an even half dozen 60-degree arcs, easy to mark, nothing more than a radial length required if you know the trick, calculation rendered superfluous.

But at what cost? The wheel divided by six is a wheel divided in half, prone to buckling, vulnerable to folding when you hit that rock cockeyed. Divide the wheel into sevenths, and opposite each joint is a solid stretch of strong wood grain. There is strength in oddness.

Do you see?

Maybe not. In which case, I draw to your attention the seven-sliced pie (sorry, no photo). I grew up hearing the legendary prowess of my grandmother, who could slice a pie into even sevenths. Any fool can do eigths, and sixths are pretty easy too, but the seven-sliced pie requires a keen eye. No zipping the knife all the way across; she had to know the center, the 51-point-something angle. Each cut depended on confidence in the face of chaos, each slice an expression of asymmetry that would add up to: symmetry.

The seven-slice pie was not a matter of neccesity. It was a luxury. She had a family of six. The extra slice was for the hard worker home after a long day (her, often enough, because not only granddad went to the mill), the kid who excelled, the neighbor whose kindness merited recognition. Or, he-hee, the cook whose hand made it. Number seven was the extra. They were not rich, grandma and grand-daddy, but they could still live large. 

Silence of the Dams Lifted (Temporarily)

Emergence.

Recently, I walked what had been the bottom of a lake for the past 50 years. A crack had appeared in the dam plugging that stretch of the Columbia, and as a precaution, the lake had been mostly drained. The fat placid bullfrog of a lake became a snake, flaccid flow replaced by rapids.

Shallow soundings, deep sounds

With the water level dropped, rocks and riffles raise their voices.  The Big River (translation of many Tribes' names for the Columbia) sings its song for the first time in decades. Some say that there's a stretch just below the Priest Rapids dam where the river runs free, but for the most part, the Oregon/Washington part of the river (hundreds of miles) has lost its voice in the age of hydro-electric power and irrigation diversion. Hearing riffles and rapids amounts to time travel, and I was lucky enough to hear that past, now. 

One goose says to another...

With the Columbia back in it's channel, creatures from geese to archaeologists walk the flood plain again. Minus the muffling waters, footsteps echo, gravel slips and crunches. The old fords become visible again, instead of dark placid waters crossed only by bridges and damns. 

Threatening to fight, even in death.

On the other hand, dropping the level of a dam lake leaves a lot of creatures accustomed to the sodden past 50 years high and dry. What the photos don't convey is the smell of millions of mussels rotting in the Spring sun, the stench of crayfish turning to rotten goo in their exoskeletons. Weirdly, there was little evidence of gulls and crows Columbia Gorging themselves on this buffet. No wheeling and squawking birds, and the aquatic critters even more silent than usual.

Hopefully, I'll get back again before the dam is fixed, and waters rise again to swallow the roar of rapids, the rhythm of riffles.

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.

The Real Paleo Diet

Keep walking, paleo dudes; it's bound to warm up someday.

Because I procrastinate, other people have beat me to the punch, but rest assured that this archaeologist has had it in for The Paleo Diet (TPD) since first learning that it was not a joke. The book, the fad, and the spin-offs have as much to do with the actual diet of Paleolithic peoples as Indiana Jones has to do with the Nazi-free tedium of actual archaeology.

The ideal is that if we ate like our early human (or pre-human for that matter) ancestors, we'd avoid being diabetic lardasses. TPD's inventor, Loren Cordain, has a PhD in health, and I suppose I could snipe at his utter lack of awareness of what Paleolithic people actually ate (and more importantly, I hope you will see, what they did to procure those calories), or lower myself to the credentials attack so favored by archaeological and other academics.

But instead, let's just take a look at where The Paleo Diet fails to be the paleo diet. Let's see what it really took to feed ourselves in the pre-agricultural world.

First off, nearly all of the fruits and veggies that you can gorge on in The Paleo Diet, well, they didn't exist in the Paleolithic. As a phase of human development, despite its many accomplishements, the Paleolithic is adamantly non-agricultural, so much so that archaeologists inserted the Mesolithic as a buffer, just to make sure that any latent or proto-agricultural pursuits (selecting, seeding, and weeding of wild food patches, for example) were excluded from the early times. You want to go Paleo? Then forget the "fruits and veggies" allowed by Dr. Cordain, because nearly all of them are from species domesticated over generations by post-Paleo peoples. Eggs? Not unless you grab 'em from under a wild bird or reptile (or monotreme, I guess, if you live down under). Macadamia nut oil? You've gotta be kidding.

Hooray! A wild berry; just don't eat it all at once.

Modern Americans tend to think of unfamiliar and ethnic-sounding foods as more primitive/pristine, but many of them still fall far short of being Paleo. Acting like your quinoa concoction is "wild" is an insult to the Inca (and before them, Wari and Tiahuanacu) farmers who domesticated it, and to the hippies who continue to grow it up north. Go gather goosefoot yourself, if you want something less sullied by the selective hand of man.

But the list of what you can eat and be Paleo is only part of the argument for TPD's bullshititude. A roster of  What Thou Shall Not Eat to remain truly Paleo makes the strictures of Leviticus look easy. No crops, no domesticated animals, and sure as hell no mammal-milk from the wild creatures (defined as: everyone but mom).

Paradoxically, the Paleo person may also have had more choices than the Kosher observant, if only because we have no clue about religious strictures in the way distant past. You are hungry, and you spy some crayfish or lizards,...you eat them. If you die soon after, your smarter relatives avoid those species. If your life consists of wandering the earth in search of food to simply remain standing, your religion may have more to do with Thanks than with Rules.

Speaking of wandering, get used to it. A key component of Paleolithic nutrition is walking. Needless to say, no catching a bus to the store or even driving to your favorite foraging spot. Sadly, being in modern America, it must be pointed out that there would be no horses, dinosaurs, or other mounts to relieve your feet. Trekking across the land, searching for food, hauling it back home, and doing all the prep with tools you have to make  yourself,...takes a lot of energy. Be careful not to burn more calories than you can hunt or gather (but Rejoice! for all this walking keeps you trim and slim). Oh, and be ready to pull up stakes and move camp a few times a year, because hunting depletes game, and plants grow where they want, not where you would consider it convenient, oh ye pre-agricultural Paleo person.

And speaking of housing, your only heat is a fire, the fuel for which must also be gathered, which may involve a lot more walking, returning with heavy loads. Then you stoke the fire in your cave or saplings-and-bark or whalebones-and-sod dwelling. Hope your Paleo food is healthy, because you will be in close quarters with other humans and their ailments, not to mention the constant smoke from the fire.

So, are we clear? The real Paleolithic diet is probably pretty damned healthy, assuming you don't eat a toxic plant or mollusc, and that your hovel-mates are healthy, and that you are killed suddenly in a hunting accident before lung disease kicks in. But anything touched by the hand of man, not just processed, but domesticated, is a sham. Anything bought rather than hunted or pulled off the landscape? Nope. A life of constant walking, clothing yourself in what you can tan or weave, eating what you can find,...that life is probably going to give you a healthy body until a mastodon rips you a new one, or years of breathing sand and smoke chokes you, or whatever.

Or, you can feast on spelt and walnut oil, broccolini and mangoes. There are plenty of healthy ways to subsist. Just don't call it Paleo until you've doing it with your own stone and bone tools, and eating only the wildest of foods in your humblest of abodes.

Cocktail Attire

That is one weird cock-tail.

Due to some oversight, I was invited to my high school reunion. They must've forgotten the omnidirectional scorn that characterized my relationship with most everyone I graduated with. Or, because another member of the Virginia Diaspora (a legally married lesbian!?!) tipped me off.

I did show up for the sesquidecadal reunion, for the same reason that most people show up to such things: spite. "Yes, preppie kids who stuck around town and do boring shit and glom onto our parents' revenue stream," I thought, "I am a fucking archaeologist,...in Hawai`i."


Well, no more. Now I am a fucking archaeologist in the Pacific Northwest. Which will sound less cool to them, but only due to their ignorance. And I am happy enough to stay home and skip their forced revelry.

Which includes: drinks at a place named "Bar Louie," (turns out to be a franchise chain, one that did not even exist when we were in high school, located at an "upscale" mall that was a farm at the time; in so being, it is a multi-dimensional  tribute to shallowness and land-rape), a football game (we were a new high school, booted around by every other school, but I guess we're supposed to forget that), and a reunion at the country club (apparently, it is no longer segregated).

For the latter, we are advised to come clad in "cocktail wear." According to the internet, this is a clothes-class I do not own. I do have a suit, but someone has to die for me to wear it, and it is probably full of moth holes by now anyway. Fixation with the idea that there are "correct" outfits is one of the main things that turned me off to these people in the first place. I'd have thought they'd have grown out of it, but apparently not.

And I have not, it is now clear, grown out of my disdain for the money-worshipping fools of western Henrico County. Pose at your upscale bar. Go to the football game as a bloc, and pretend you were never the jealous backbiting bunch you were. Live it up at the country club while darkies and the wastrel sons of millionaires serve up drunken dreams. I'll be home, or in the field, doing something worthwhile instead.

My Sporadic Ritual of Cellphonicide

My flip-phone may be gone, but this shirt is forever.

It would be easy to blame the occasional destruction of cellphones on my work. If I just told people that it was dropped into a bottomless lava tube, or drowned in a Cascadian stream, or even dropped in some remote spot where the next person to see it will be an excited archaeologist (who happens to be a cousin of President Bush VI), they would believe it.

Other than one that was swampified on a wapato hunt (I'd held a camera over my head for hours, while the phone was in my pocket, in the mud, so it was a stupid waste), however, the culprit has generally been the washing machine, into which I'd thrown the phone, again in the pocket. Maybe if I'd had one of those phone holsters, accepted awkward accoutrements in the name of protecting the phone, but no, I liked the pocket of my fake Carhart work pants, the skinny one on the side that's so convenient for a phone. Two fingers reach in and chopstick the phone up, an instant of weightless apex, then it falls into my palm and the thumb flips it open. Tactile satisfaction that became one of those small rituals we don't even recognize as rituals.

That one will be no more, because after destroying my most recent phone, the cheapest phone they have now is the kind with the little keyboard that slides out. Not as fun, so far. I mean, it's not smart and there's no touch screen, so I can still embarrass my kids with it, but it's just not the same as flipping, which for someone my age is so layered in meta and ironicool. As a kid, Star Trek's communicator was the future. As an adult, the future arrived, and a huge percentage of first-calls on first-generation flip-phones included a Shatneresque pose and the words "Beam me up." Now, those times and tech are archaic (the actual flip-phone era, that is, the Trek ones still being acceptable on a certain level to younger hipsters). But I digress, and recognize that I am in way over my head trying to talk Trek.

No telling how long this phone will last. I don't think I'll miss it like the flipper, which is not all that much, to be honest, flip-phones being a flimsy substitute for the old Nokia brick.

The Brick, in Period-appropriate Resolution

Compared to the flip-ritual, the less frequent (and thus, more momentous) ritual of cellphonicide embodies much more. Like the drift into reminisce I got into above, a lamentation that the consumption economy leads always to new models, more features, more intrusion, a big shallow network in which nobody is worth more than a few seconds' attention and the ads will not cease. Killing the phone may have been an accident, but as with any religious act, retroactive imbuement with significance is allowed, and it can be ruled a sacrifice. The disdain for the dead phone, stripped and recycled (resurrected, perhaps, in some 3rd World place, but that's not my doing) is also a statement: I don't care about this gadget and its demise.

Of course, I do end up going out and getting another phone. I'm no John Henry (especially since I have no more Nokia, which oculd be used to hammer a jack). At the store, I subject the young staff who actually feel sorry for my backwardness to a cold luddite demand that they get me something that's cheap as shit and goes on my prepaid plan. No contract, no data plan, no upgraded phone. No small talk foreplay to the upsell, get me my archaic phone so I can get back to embarrassing my kids.

Losing the phone means losing the numbers stored up on its card, and though I could just ask the NSA to tell me, getting a new phone means I'll seek out people again. Contacting them some other way and asking for their number again, renewing the connections, and talking with some people whose voices I've not heard for a while when I do finally find them. It used to be easier, because I used to remember numbers instead of making my phone do it, or, if you can believe it, I would write them down. Also, there are the connections that don't continue. For one last time, I think about that person I don't think about anymore, or someone I do think about turns out to be out of reach, no number I can get at. That's the difference between evanescent reminisce and a fistful of wistfulness.

So, here I go again. My number's the same--in case you're reading this and know me--give me a call. I'll reconnect, and enjoy that. I'll celebrate the death of another phone (forgot to mention how this one went: it fell out while I was at the county landfill, never to be seen again), and shake my fist at the demons Verizon, 4g, and Smartphone. I'll have fuzzy nostaligia for old tech.

Then I'll wait til next time.

It's the Fountain? An Olympia (and Tenino) Mystery Artifact

The front of a font, maybe.

Last Fall, I came across something that other people have probably seen for years, and others have forgotten about for even longer, but it was new and mysteriouis to me. Embedded in an old road berm on the Eastbay shore was a big piece of carved sandstone. Recently, I was around as a city crew pulled it free as they prepare for an environmental restoration project. In decades of archaeologizing, this stands out as one of the biggest and most interesting artifacts I've seen. It also holds a few mysteries.

Now that I've had the chance to look at it a few times, see the dirt it came out of, and talk it over with a few other archaeologists as we examined it, a few things are not so mysterious. Like, it was pretty obviously just dumped here along with concrete, asphalt, and brick rubble, part of the berm that blocked the mouth of a creek; a neighbor thinks the Salmon Club may have been involved, but it is also in a City park, at the bottom of an old road, and may have been deposited by them. I'll get to why I think that may be the case in a bit.

The stone is sandstone, and a partially obliterated inscription on one end is enough to convince me that it came from the Hercules Quarry in Tenino. The top features a square flanked by two octagonal basins, and a tunnel runs through it. There is rust surrounding one side of the opening, indicating that there was a metal attachment there, and along with pipes running from bottom to top, it suggests that this may have been a decorative fountain. The base, beginning immediately below the tunnel through the stone, at first appeared to be sandstones as well, but turns out to be stucco over concrete. The very bottom is unadorned concrete that contains glacial pebbles and bits of shell, more what you'd expect of a locally-mixed batch than what comes from commercial suppliers. More specifically, what you'd expect from a shoreline local batch than Tenino. (Ironically, the development of commercial concrete businesses is what did in the Hercules and other quarries in Tenino.)

The top.

And that's about it for what I know. A once fancy piece of stonework, stripped of metalwork and dumped on the Olympia shoreline. Maybe a fountain, and if my interpretation of the inscription (shown below, after considerable computer enhancement) is correct, it was a presentation piece. It just so happens that the abandoned road heading uphill from this spot leads to the former location of the "Swiss Chalet" that stood in Priest Point Park from not long after it's 1905 founding until the 1950s. Before that, the Chalet had been part of Olympia Brewing Company's pavilion at the Lewis and Clark Expo in Portland. A nicely carved fountain proclaiming a presentation and naming the quarry seems like just the sort of thing that may have appeared in that sort of setting, especially since Olympia Brewing even in those days was stating, "It's the Water."

Or, maybe the Hercules folks presented it to the park. Or, something else. Some sort of Park connection makes sense, though, given the proximity (seems like an awful big stretch to say that some Tenino resident hauled it all the way up here to dump it), and the fact that you need heavy machinery just to move the thing.

"PRESENTED BY HERCULES QUARRY, TENINO WASH" (Guesswork in grey).

Odds are, this modestly monumental stonework, dumped and forgotten for years, is likely to be recycled by the City of Olympia. Maybe placed in the park, or maybe elsewhere, but people once again see it as something interesting, worth using for some better purpose than shoreline armoring. Maybe it could be fixed up and one of Olympia's artesian wells could bubble forth from it.

In the meantime, if anyone out there knows about this, or has photos of the chalet in Portland or in our park, leave a comment and let me know. If I find out anything, I'll write an update. 

Obliterative Persistence

Yon shot shows the floodzone of Scottsville, Virginia, on the River James. Once, it was called by King James' subjects the River of Powhatan, the name they used for the local leader Wahunsenacawh (father of the one they called Pocahontas), but this is upstream of his territory, where Monacan people no doubt had their own name. 

The photo is dominated by the most recent development along the north bank of the river, the massive dike clad in grass; it protects a town where people travel by pick-up and, increasingly, crossover SUVs and hybrids, none of which appreciate being flooded. Just to the right is the penultimate development, black rails on a bed of gravel where grass nor weeds nor even the most beautiful shrubbery are tolerated. Under that, and perhaps in the trees to the right, lies the canal that was obsolesced by the railroad; old timey as it may seem, the canal was no less a scheme to make money off of development and the transit of goods to markets. The red brick building handled the trade, but now it's cut off by dike and a pair of rails.

Further right, the brownwater of the James peeks between tree trunks. Once, people and their stuff moved on the river itself. Canoes, then batteaux. Way before that, there was a low spot in the terrain that water sought in it's quest to become saline. Now, cities pump out of the flow so the masses may drink, and a warming globe sucks it dryer and dryer every summer. 

Even when I canoed this part of the river in the early 1980's and had to hop out and tow it (downstream, no less) through massive algae blooms in tepid water, the James seemed like a hard place to move even a lightly loaded boat. The canal meant to bypass seasonal shallows and permanent outcrops was first damaged by federal troops before succumbing to rail-borne manifest destiny. Railroads still run, but mostly for the most massive of commodities such as Appalachian coal headed seaward, while diesel trucks carry the bulk of consumer goods. The town of Scottsville feels safe behind it's dike, but this too is momentary, as it was not planned for the climate changes facing the good townspeople and everyone else. 

The town exists because there a road crosses a river. One transportation system lays itself over the last. The stay the same even as they change. What we are used to will change, and what we build will fall, but the river still flows to the sea.

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.

RVA Hardcore History: Death Piggy

During Reagan's second term, the Party purged the once-beloved Death Piggy

 
The internet has many makers of lists and databases, masters of arcanery and esoterica,  publishers of data and history. I'm not one of them, but sometimes I do pluck from this orchard when I bake up a blog, and I thank the geeks and rememberers of the world, who make it so easy for lazy people like me to delve into that most important of contemporary social issues: hardcore punk in early 1980s Richmond Virginia.

Today's graphic comes from the internet somewhere, in a corner I cannot recall. It's a flier for a...read it yourself. The Death Piggy logo underlying the "Banned" symbol, that perturbed swine sticking his tongue out, was ubiquitous in the early '80s, and archaeologists will discover the image when they sift through the rubble of VCU and the Fan. I drew it and so did dozens of other punks over a course of years: on jeans and arms, on bathroom stalls, on buildings and cop cars. OK, maybe I made up that last one, but Death Piggy was widespread, staring at passers by from DC to Raleigh, almost none of whom knew the hostile hog. 

Lots of people know about GWAR, that karmic joke on Dave Brockie, who concocted the band as a joke and was consumed, cornered in a world where people love him as long as he wears the costume, and who write off Death Piggy as proto-GWAR, trivia.

Not me. Then and now, Death Piggy is one of my favorite bands. They played a bunch of the hardcore punk shows, and I saw them a bunch of times. At least once, I left a show before the Famous Band would play, high on Death Piggy and not wanting to come down for a diva like Rollins or some big tall mohawk band of Brits.

Why? Because I guess to me Death Piggy was the most genuinely free music I'd heard. They could thrash, but also resort to a stoney echo or all kinds of other shit (I told you, I'm not a list-maker). The lyrics were absurdly entertaining, all the more so because the singer was a fluent and inventive singer of Cartoonese. Before being trapped by GWAR regalia, they just wore whatever felt right that day, no fealty whatsoever to black leather. When the band wasn't playing, they'd dance with the rest of us. Freedom.

Richmond's puerco muerto was eventually slaughtered by the dark overlords of GWAR, but the spirit lives on. It comforts the afflicted with the pleasing aroma of bacon, and whenever a punk kid is derided for not wearing the uniform, the spirit causes the derider to wet himself. And for those of us in the Virginia Diaspora, Death Piggy reminds us of days when Richmond punks were free, crazy, and in love with a piggy.

[NOTE: Were I a real blogger, I'd link to Death Piggy songs, or maybe just post a link with some pithy but twit-length comment. But I am not. There are a bunch of their songs on myspace and youtube, go get 'em yourself.]

Footstep Echoes

Not Nisqually, or even near Olympia, but you get the idea.

The girls and I have been enjoying Olympia on foot lately. We covered 4 miles on the Nisqually delta board walk, cold and windy, but rewarded with wildlife and a hot meal afterward. We ambled downtown (yes, humans can get places without cars), exploring neighborhoods and urban wildlife along the way to the farmers market, followed by a bus ride back (no, humans don't have to let the feet carry the load all the time). Forays through the neighborhood (sometimes with feet pushing pedals instead of pounding pavement) with no particular goal in mind. Motor-free missions to scope out firework viewing spots, or just to pick up a few things at the grocery. Walking down to the port to greet canoe-loads of tribal paddlers (ready to set foot on land after crossing Salish seas), and then trudging back uphill. Yesterday, we walked out on a beach as far as a very low tide would allow, our feet in water that does not hit new land til Asia.

We're exploring, finding where the cute puppies live and where the sweet fruit grows. We're getting places or going nowhere in particular. We're experiencing city grit and natural beauty. We're finding short cuts and long vistas. We're discovering secret gardens and re-discovering public places that exist only as blurs to the car-bound.

We're spending lots of time together with no screens, with no walls. Feet keep moving, and conversation flows. I was never a hiker, but this is familiar to me; it's in my blood. I remember walking through university woods with my family in search of blueberries and a Greek theater. I recall walking what seemed like a long way through the little town where my grandparents lived, visiting neighbors, the firehouse, and ending up at a soda fountain where we would watch our milkshakes take form. These things happened with lifelong teachers who appreciated the value of leaving classrooms and letting places teach at the pace of foot-falls.

As we walk, the earth is pressing memories into our feet. The kids may not remember any one sight, or a particular conversation that passed between us, but the ground was walked on by us, together, our feet shared places and soaked them up. (I enjoy walking solo, too, but moving as a small pack adds something.) Memories are being implanted in our soles, imprinted on our souls, nevermind whether our brains take note yet.

Dr. Bigelow's Time Machine

Olympia's first church/school-house. Asahel Curtis photo, citation at the end of this post.

In 1853, Olympia was neither capital nor part of a state, not even free of Oregon territory yet. It was a ramshackle frontier town, late enough in Native history to be a shadow, and early enough in American history to be attractive primarily to scoundrels and dreamers. I guess it should not come as a surprise that the citizens (of what country? maybe we should call them denizens) were having the same arguments that they have today.

Take a look at this passage from the journal of Daniel Bigelow, a lawyer who (in a reversal of modern expectations) fit more in the dreamer than the scoundrel category, being a supporter of letting non-whites own land, providing women the vote, and other heresies:

(November 8, 1853) Am endeavoring to get funds raised for a school having been elected a director, on the 4th Inst. Find some men who profess great interest in the welfare of the country, that will not pay a school tax or contribute to support a school.  I consider the heart of all such men rotten at the core  That they are destitute of principle and have no laudible desire to advance and encourage morality, and promote the general welfare.  And I here record my determination never to vote for such men, nor trust them nor deal with them only in case of necessity, For a man who has no interest in schools, to my mind has no interest in honesty

Yup. Even before we were a state, there were precursors of the 21st Century GOP, individuals who sought unfettered commerce. And by unfettered, I mean with utterly no responsibility to the common good. Maybe they figured their kids could be shipped back east for education, or maybe they considered education an abomination (though the Origin of Species had yet to be published). Maybe they were home-schooling their kids in between felling virgin forests and stealing Salish prairies for farmland.


"But hold on a minute," you might say. "Who said that people who oppose public education were commerce-boosters?" Daniel R Bigelow, that's who:

(February 8, 1854) The first election for Washington Territory just past. Columbia Lancaster elected Delegate to Congress, Myself one of the Councelman for Thurston Co, in the Legislature.  Great efforts was made to defeat my election by the grocery influence, because I do not patronize groceries.  But I hope to live to see the sale of liquor prohibited as a beverage in this Territory, and decency and morality prevail.

Replace "groceries" with "CostCo," or for that matter, jsut keep "groceries," and you have one of the most recent election's main issues encapsulated. It makes me want to start a Bigelow Community Garden, where we can grow food free of the impure grocery influence. Not that I'm against liquor, mind you, but more the influence of a particular capitalist enterprise putting itself above the public good of, for example, having state store which employed a thousand or so people at a living wage, and which did not sell liquor late in the evening, when people are more likely to get in trouble with it, and which had no accounting tricks to keep the state revenue from flowing to other public goods. 

Some of you may have detected an anti-religious bent to my statements above, a residue of evolutionist thinking that proves bitter to the pious palate. But again, that's not the case. I know some religiously observant people from the various monotheisms and polytheisms who are genuinely good, who love their fellow humans, and treat them with kindness and respect. Religion does not (always) douse that flame of common human decency, but hypocrisy does, as the good Dr. Bigelow (himself a habitual churchgoer) noted:

(October 28, 1853) Several of the new Territorial officers are in town.    since their arrival rowdyism has greatly increased in town. There is to-night a ball which is considered a fashionable affair, because it is patronized by the officers. Professed Christians go, for the benefit of society as they allege (but really for fear they will not be ranked with the aristocracy. I am at present considered rather an odd chap, not showing respect and attention enough to the said officers etc for which they are going to ride over me rough shod (if they can)


So there we have it. Same-old same-old. I wish we'd learn, but I'm not holding my breath.



And now, for the citation I promised you:

Negative Number	A. Curtis 01401
Repository	University of Washington Libraries. Manuscripts, Special Collections, University Archives Division
Repository Collection	Asahel Curtis Photo Company Collection no. 482

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.

HI NW

Maybe you knew about it all along, but it was not until I was fully grown that I learned about the Hawai'i - Northwest connection. Cook and then Vancouver sailed (and ailed and aled) between these places in the late 18th Century, and there are those who feel that certain petroglyphs in Bella Coola may demonstrate that the Hawaiians had already done so before. The Hawaiian islands provided sandalwood and firewood, provisions and crew (weary and horny Anglos jumped ship in Lahaina, and adventurous Hawaiians took their places) during the fur and silk trade. Maybe because they both loved kings, the Hawaiians and British took to each other, among the expressions of which was a minor migration of Hawaiians to the Columbia and points north, in country that was then more Brittanic (or Gallic, maybe Russki).


I moved to Hawai'i before I knew any of this, and so I was a little surprised to find that a favorite dish there, and pretty much the only local kine grind with land-based non-starchy vegetables in it was something called lomi salmon. Tomato (hard to grow in the islands since diseases and fungi caught up, but historic sources indicate it did alright soon after introduction), onion, and salt salmon. It looks like this (but tastes even better):

"Lomi" derives from lomilomi, the Hawaiian art of massage. You need to turn the ingredients together with your hands to get the  tomato juice on the salmon, to bleed onion spice into the tomato, and to spread the salmon salt throughout. 


I made this last week with the trimmings from a king salmon I'd inexpertly filleted. Salted and drained and resalted and redrained and salted again the bits o salmon. Rinsed and dried and added a diced Yakima tomato and homegrown progeny of Walla Walla onion. 


None of the girls would share it with me, because they figured the salmon was raw. True, it was never cooked, but the salt basically dehydrates it, so it does not seem so raw. Not exactly jerky tough, but the salmon ends up being a salty, slightly chewy nugget in the soft tomato matrix. The onions add crunch, sweet allium crunch. I had no ogo, but may try to get some next time. 


This dish marries the Northwest and Hawai'i Nei, transcending a swath of the world's largest ocean. To eat it is to consume history, to break open the barrel of salt fish in a Honolulu house, to hybridize cuisines in a Kanaka Village kitchen on the Columbia. To have it here and now, with a sun-ripened tomato, a sweet onion from my yard, and a salmon that swam the morning before it was salted, is delicious beyond description.

Saturated

I like nature. But as you may have noticed from some recent photos, I like sature. I saturate the hell out of some shots, and mess around with the color. Maybe because I have a lot of photos of grey days, and don't feel like I have to slavishly reproduce nature to love it. Maybe I am shiftless.

Or, maybe it's that that strain of mutancy that struck me 30 or so years ago has never been cured. Then, symptoms included hair bleached, blacked, and partially shaven. Clothes torn and meant to menace. People who paid attention could see the inconspicuous roots: middle class, suburban, performing well on standardized tests, and not very likely to fight the cops or die young. But the contrast was dialed way up, the colors were different than preppie era Mid-Atlantica, and there really was starkness and darkness the likes of which you cannot imagine if you have never lived through Reagan with his eager finger on the button.

Through a series of unexpected coincidences and alliances, the colors changed again. When you feel ya a good philia coming on, some new interest, and the doors appear and open, then lights flood in and the darkness seeps out to become a flimsy membrane separating universes you can transcend. Somehow, this expressed as less black, diminishing hair ministrations, and a lot more paisley. Eventually it would dampen into earthier hues, but 25 years ago was a time of oscillating from day-glo to thrift store treasure and less tie dye than you'd think. I became a cartoon, not just for the magic powers, but because the '80's needed a good cartoon, mired in the Smurf and He-Man nadir of American animation as it was. Lessons remain and reverberate from those cartoon characters: Joe Science, Lemon Meringue Hair, Monkee Michael Nesmith's lesser known cousin. (Under the heading of "Coincidence, or Cosmic Reverberation?": the TV just cut to a shot of a wee chameleon wandering through a forest of mushrooms).

Then it was time for something completely different. A decade in Hawai`i, exposed to da max and saturated in reefwater blue and mauka greens. Tropical colors hanging loose on shirts larger (to make room for all the results of ono grinds and aloha), but not as gaudy as you'd imagine: the back of the fabric faces out on locals, I still bought at thrift stores, and I wore them often under tropical sun. There were lessons in humility and culture, and a garden that managed to show me new roots while bringing me back to some that had grown for generations in Virginia soil.

Another series of not-so-unexpected events meant the Hawai`i thing could not be sustained, and a partnership between coincidence and intent brought me to the northwest. Colors more subdued than ever as far as the clothes go, me more sub-dude. Blending in for the most part (or not--I might be underestimating my slovenliness, which may be cartoonish for all I know). Saturation, hi-exposure hi-contrast images occur primarily in my mind for month upon drizzly month. Words vivid, livid, and lurid make their way into black and white. I dunno what the picture for this period will look like, and so it is an image from this time that I've played with for this post.
 
So, I no stay Hawai`i anymore, nor can I even remember it without a sepia filter of nostalgia and fuzzy recall. I never was a very good hippie; never tried, really, there being enough punk remaining to relentlessly mock hippies who were 20 years too late to be anything more than historical re-enactors. My ears still ring with punk shows that ended 20 years from now, but I don't even have enough gumption to go down and yell at today's re-enactors, and don't really get into costumery anymore. Things change.


And things stay the same. Like roots. Everywhere I've lived, the native people had roots cultural and literal. Sustenance for society and stomach. As much as I might look or even think different, there has always been some tether between me and the earth, some string through me and my people. Saturated and distorted as some snapshots of my life have been, the roots just hang in there, more or less the same. 

[Seriously, what changes less in the shots above than that little plant, it's yellow flowers, it's big happy root belly? How is it that in the last shot, where nothing else is the color that it was in so-called reality, can the plant persist unadalterated? Must be that I am a meddler, not a creator. Ego has its limits.]

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.

Old School

"Old School" did not occur widely in American English til I was too old to claim not to personify it.

Old School is my favorite pizzeria.
Old School teaches us how to survive.
Old School emerges in Old Age too wise to be ashamed of oldness.
Old School teaches archaeologists.
Old School rocks like 21st Century kids never will.

"Old School" means whatever my lengthening, fail-prone memory assigns.

Auwe!

Once I had a garden in Honolulu. I built stone terraces around an old mango tree, grew ancient crops, played with my baby girl. For the better part of a decade, I went there every other day or so. Took it on as a pile of rubble, left it as a little oasis of rich organic soil in the middle of a city.

I just looked at it in the google aerial view, and felt like I'd been kicked in the stomach. The mango and the terraces are gone. The big retaining wall that had kept this little place hidden was replaced recently, I guess, and they bulldozed the garden. Maybe it's buried under stone and concrete, but the life is gone.

Auwe. Lamentations.