“But I was thinking of a plan to dye one's whiskers green.”--Lewis Carroll
We at Wit have been thinking of ways to mark the season already passing quickly, so quickly overhead like the streaks of stars in a National Geographic time lapse photo. They told me time would speed up this way back in the slow, droll days of my childhood. I thought they were both boring and nuts back then, and they were that of course, but they were also--fuckin' a--right.
The grassy, bejeweled bandersnatch above is one idea we considered for flaunting the fulcrum of our Summer Anno Domini 2006 well into fall, but even in Lewis Carroll's day the idea was being bandied about, so it's not so novel this dye job. Anyway, most of the world would be completely unaware of our emblem, and we like to be able to fly our freak flags. (Carroll, like Shakespeare, invented everything, didn't he, and the rest of us just copy, or try to play catch up.)
How many ways to mark memory there are though here in funhouse Venice, where our streets and canals are a story scratched across the land by the shaky, strangely bony hand of our founder Abbott Kinney, whose citywide work of poetic description I read with my feet more than just stroll through.
The alleys are the footnotes of the avenues, said poet David Berman. I swear to you D.B.'s maxim is more true here than anywhere else on earth, as we Venetians are citiizens of an enormous crazy quilt that is almost completely the Outsider Art vision of a single man. The traffic lights are punctuation leading me to the end of a sentence, the knobs of the bungalow gates down our street read like braille-- bump, bump, bump. And so on, feeling things across town.
But the invisible monuments to memory, mine yours and Kinney's, cut deep too, like furrows in the air, or notches on (or below) the psychic belt. But we also make real, material memory trophies you can see and feel and even sport Wit Of The Staircase-style: we have a hobby, we confess, of making garlands of our enemies' ears.
Such were the Apache raids this summer, though, that our victory-strings would weigh us down like the horrible strands of enormous pearls the mermaids out here in California are forced to wear when some sea-witch wants to fuck with them out of jealousy of their sinuous freedom of movement and so weigh them down. You elsewhere may have read Dominick Dunne describe this dreadful Hollywood drill in Vanity Fair.
So our Summer victory cup runneth over, as I said, but we decided we will share our principal seasonal prize with you in the form of this statue in the air: Coming back yesterday to Los Angeles from the Freak Folk concert in beautiful Big Sur held at the pretty, perfect Henry Miller Library Wit fell asleep with the driver's moon roof open to the dark dandruffy summer sky of Pacific and redwood and mountain and star and did awake staring first up into the flecked enormity and then jerking her head to orient herself as the car breezed past the Santa Barbara County Street exit 90A: Summerland.
Enjoy the last days of August 2006, my friends.
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