was this time when the set was still standing in the studios and the backdrop was barren, the walls still there, the wooden framing, cowboy-generic Hollywood Main Street, baking in the California sun as the cowboys rolled onto the set on their horses chasing the American Indians to the nearest bingo casino onto the reservations and playing the money game, no extremes too deadly to inherit the Earth, no companies too friendly to dump uranium waste into unsuspecting Native American lungs. And Agent Orange used in Vietnam. Viruses may have been created in the chemical disease control research centers, where AIDS could have had its origins. The fun stopped a long time ago, even after Desert Storm or Bosnia, Kosovo, Middle East, African poverty and grief, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, Darfur, Turkmenistan, Burma, Lebanon, Israel, North Korea and other ever-present hot spots, making the world safe again for our heroes on both ends of the political spectrum.
Jesse, you’re no fool. You traveled to the South US of A to register blacks in the voting-rights days, the days of civil rights and the blacklists. The KKK had a field day, and the Confederate Flag sometimes flies in Austria, and the Harley-Davidson commercialism rolls right onto the latest T-shirt. Hogs and bravado fighting on in Sweden and other branches of Hells Angels.
Funny the tidbits picked up in word-print, that facsimile of the world’s events, reported and written and edited and censored and then proclaimed as the news of the world, news-bites or newsbytes, the hard disc purring along. Now the sacred gurus are having a convention at the expensive club on the other side of the tracks, free lunches handed out on Central Avenue in Korea Town, and in Boyle Heights where the grandparents came and settled into the last bastion of Jewish ghetto in L.A. It’s all one big gentrification now, with building developers, insurance companies, and HMO’s on parade, next to the latest anti-depressant, the newest pills to research a cure, the latest drug to entice or to facilitate an erection. The guns-and-roses mentality, conglomerates controlling entertainment airwaves until we call in our “acting out” brains. The continuum concept is alive and well in self-hate, lack of self esteem and self confidence, the outer layer exposed and hiding underlayers of madness. The persona, the intimate man, the loving woman, the fate of us all in the balance . . . and on and on . . .
10.
IN THE VIENNA WOODS
Now what were those words doing here, rattling around my brain as I walk in this still forest, with its many shades of green? Pine trees, and the thin and plentiful, small and straight trees whose name I do not know. And the white birch-like trees, all of them shimmering in the slight breeze, with the afternoon sun shining through the flickering leaves. The shadows and the light, the opposites combined, always present like the leopard and the kid, the wolf with the lamb, all so irrelevant now as I feel the earth beneath my feet.
My shoes glide, shuffling against the ground soaked with after-rain wetness beside a flowing stream carrying runoff from the recent downpour. I hear the fresh gurgling talking water. Birds chirp, singing and rustling leaves, looking for something, hopping to and fro. Overhead, clouds play hide and seek with the sun, while underneath in this forest, the protection is comforting.
All alone, I walk for a long time lost in thought and then no thought. The movement carries me along as if my body were weightless, and someone, something else, is moving it as if gliding unseen, a guest and yet at home here in this nature that seems so gentle now. Where is home, after all?
There are many hues of brown and green, yellows and orange, with a sky that is mostly clear blue with a few billowy white clouds moving by. This is where we return when our time is over and we must leave our body, and the decay starts and continues, just like that tree over there that must have fallen last winter. Already there are insects and new green leaves sprouting around its roots. This compost, all this humus and new fertilizer: after the death begins new life, and the life cycle continues on and on and on . . . despite what man does. We think we are so holy and important, and yet we are just small little ants in this universe.
What was that? Oh look, it’s a little squirrel! Light brown, and caught in a glance with me. We are feeling each other. We stop for an eternal moment, a lifetime. My breath is carried away. The squirrel stands on its back legs, looking, not scared. It seems to recognize me.
Are we communicating through thought, energy transference, something connecting us all, the plants and animals, the symbiotic relationship, the mix? The moment passes as we continue on, squirrel first. He or she has work to do — must comb about the forest, hide things, look for things, scurry about. Oh, that must be the mate coming over, wondering what happened. We know this grokking of each other. It’s been going on for millennia, forever. We humans think so much, we forget to live and feel and breathe, and just be at ease.
All of a sudden I hear the piano again, da da da da da . . . as the green evaporates into a recital hall. Is it Strauss, or — who was it that used to write and walk in the Vienna Woods inspired by the beauty, the sheer innocence, the intensity, the cool, crisp, luft/air so rare and dear? Caught up in a dream, a recital with the Kaiser at the palace perhaps, pomp and circumstance from another era. The monarchy lived with the music, supporting composers at the center of a whirlwind that lives on. The music in the hearts of space, across the continents, transforming into late night radio sounds its namesake . . .
11.
TAKING ME BACK ACROSS
THE TIME ZONES . . . AGAIN
. . . The starry-eyed mists of Avalon: walking now in Topanga Canyon, hearing the coyotes howl at night, the chaparral, the golden hills of California. The respective landscapes change in my mind’s eye to fit the environment. Bingo! It’s been a hot day just outside of L.A., and the ozone is a little muddled with smogsville. This place, gentrified into elite musicians, writers, businessmen, “computer rats” working at home, etc.
I remember sitting next to Mick Jagger at the old Topanga Corral. He was with Bianca then, and Charlie Watts was there too. They were sitting next to us, and all of a sudden they lept into their black limousine and moved on down the road, only to return a few minutes later to see this new English rock group they knew and were checking out. It was an unassumingly hip low-key bar, and so the groupies were not so much in attendance. Anyway, the terrain in these whereabouts doesn’t hold the same number of trees per acre/hectare as in Austria – these are the wide open spaces, with coyotes and deer, foxes and snakes.
The Pacific coast is a few miles away. The Chumash Indians were living down there, and now the rich soak up the rays down the PCC-Pacific Coast Highway near Malibu. Bobby Zimmerman had, or his ex-wife may still have, the house with the dome, built near Pt. Dune. We used to body surf at Zuma when the waves weren’t too high. In Topanga, I used to do hatha yoga in a room above that health food restaurant, before the siddha yoga-ashram-guru era kicked in, while in Venice I used to do the asanas/postures at Earl Newman’s old art poster studio. The thoughts flicker back and forth.
Where am I, two worlds, one mind, global brain, the terrain is not the same. Am I walking in Europe thinking of California or am I only thinking of Vienna as I walk in California, in America? Two continents, the continuum pushes onward not waiting for the next breath for one pair of lungs to breathe, for the homeostasis to equalize the sound location.
I can tell a bit about myself, as I seem to be rattling on. This, so far, has been words and images and name dropping, but that is who I am. Born on both sides of the screen, the media hardware is not aware of the recorded images in all the photos taken, the mistaken images reminding one of him or her, as it may be. I often confuse myself with my image, the video one, the paper one, the one that society spits out at you, categorizing you for all to see.
The one that is registered
