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Tag: France
A Preliterate Post
Thanksgiving, a Lovely Afternoon, and Some Music
Once again, Thanksgiving time has arrived. Despite the current national political disaster, I have a lot to be thankful for this year. My partner Amy, our health, and our cozy little home in the woods tops my list, but we also took a real vacation this year, our first in many years, and my first ever trip overseas. We enjoyed a lot of lovely afternoons this year, and this little video documents one of the loveliest, the evening we went for a stroll along the Dordogne river between Le Roque Gageac and Castle Beynac in Perigord, France.
The music to this video is called “Amy’s Piece”. It started as something I used to play as a warm-up exercise on acoustic guitar. Amy and I have lived together, in the same room, for more than twenty years. I cannot begin to calculate how many thousands of hours of my musical noodling she has endured. She always particularly liked this little exercise.
Eventually, I recorded it, added an E-Bow electric guitar melody line, named it after her, and it became part of my 2007 album: Hand Made. The same piece also appears on the Humboldt Council of the Blind Benefit CD titled: “Making Blindness Fashionable” (2008 Meth Bog Records) as the final cut on the album, where they list it as, “Army’s Peace.”
Cannabis is not Wine
I hear a lot of people talk about marketing cannabis in the same way they market wine. They talk about this idea very seriously, and seem bent on betting their futures on this dream of turning Humboldt County into something like Napa County Wine Country for upscale, connoisseur grade, cannabis. This strikes me as a very foolhardy gamble. It makes me wonder “How do people who grow this good of weed not get high enough to realize how stupid of an idea this is?” There is a big difference between cannabis and fine wine. The only thing they share, really, is the inflated price tag.
First, you need to remind yourself what wine is. At it’s root, wine is what happens when ripe fruit turns sour. You don’t have wine unless you have more fruit than you can eat before it goes bad, so wine is an intoxicating byproduct of great abundance. That kind of abundance does not occur often naturally. Some hunter-gatherer cultures enjoy wine as part of an annual festival at the end of summer, if they have a native species that produces an abundance of fermentable fruit. They may drink heavily and stumble around in drunken song for a week, celebrating the abundance of nature, if the bounty of nature allows it, but they will not try to save or bottle the wine and they will not drink at all for the rest of the year. That’s native culture, not wine culture.
Wine still celebrates abundance, but not natural abundance. Wine celebrates the abundance of tamed land, where the community of life has been evicted, to make way for armies of vines which serve only their human master. Wine celebrates the abundance that comes from conquering the land and enslaving it. Wine celebrates property, mastery and dominion over the land, and it symbolizes the abundance they produce.
The aristocracy in France elevated the expression of this kind of abundance to a high art, making French wine and French food the envy of the world. The French aristocracy took tremendous pride in their cuisine and their wine, and developed very high standards for all of it. The peasants however, who produced all of this abundance by their hard work, tending to those vines and working the farms, often went hungry. Eventually, the peasants got sick of it. They formed angry mobs and they cut all of the aristocrats’ heads off. Today, France is a democratic nation and the French people enjoy a high standard of living. They still make excellent wine and produce many delicacies which hearken back to those extravagant days of unbridled indulgence.
Before we start trying to become the new Napa, we shouldn’t forget that Napa is trying to become the new Bordeaux, France. That’s why they work so hard at the whole gourmet food thing, along with the wine, and the elegant manor lifestyle. In Napa, they celebrate the abundance of capitalism in this newly conquered and enslaved land. In a sense, they compete with King Louis the XIV, in the field of self-indulgent opulence. I do not really see that as a worthy goal. To me, as a pot smoker, it sounds abhorrent, and I identify more with the angry mobs of peasants.
Now smoke a joint and remember what cannabis is. Cannabis is a natural herb that contains a revolutionary psychedelic, like LSD, only much milder. Cannabis alters our consciousness in a way that allows us to feel a connection to the whole of life. Cannabis changes how we see the world and how we perceive our place in it. Cannabis consciousness is about love, creativity, equality and the connection between all living things. Cannabis consciousness allows us to share the burden, the joy and the wonder of life, with all of life, through a kind of communion with the plant world.
Cannabis consciousness celebrates life in the power of a river and the strength of a bear. Cannabis consciousness respects diversity and demands equality. Cannabis consciousness respects nature and understands ecology implicitly. Cannabis consciousness inspires creativity and the impulse to play. Cannabis consciousness inspires an appreciation for food, not an extravagant palette, but a humble appreciation for all food, and the pleasure of eating. Cannabis consciousness encourages communication and helps resolve differences.
Cannabis consciousness looks for ways to reduce stress and minimize work through equality and cooperation. Cannabis consciousness has no use for hierarchies, authority figures or empires. Cannabis consciousness looks for quality in expressions of insight and ecstatic emotion through music and art. Cannabis consciousness sees abundance in the forest, but cannabis consciousness has no desire to conquer or enslave it, because cannabis consciousness knows that the natural world is family, and that we are all one.
Cannabis consciousness looks at a vineyard and sees poverty, slavery, toil and ugliness, not abundance. Cannabis consciousness sees right through all of the fancy packaging and bullshit hype. Cannabis consciousness sees right through it all and recognizes this upscale marketing ploy as just another ripoff, and just another attempt to conquer and enslave nature. Cannabis consciousness inspires revolutionaries and gives them the strength to fight. Cannabis is the peoples herb! It is not some frivolous indulgence for the bourgeois.
Cannabis culture is nothing like wine culture. The ideals of cannabis culture are different. The aesthetics of cannabis culture are different and the social dynamics of cannabis culture are different. Cannabis culture and wine culture are as different as night and day and cannabis consciousness recognizes that alcohol culture, wine culture, is a death cult.
Any bright future for humanity belongs to cannabis culture and depends on cannabis consciousness. Cannabis will not remain our slave any longer. Forget the wine model and the dead end culture of alcohol. Follow cannabis consciousness to a new ideal, a new aesthetic, and a new culture that’s not based on conquest and slavery, but instead based on love and respect for the whole of life. Regardless of how frightening and economically uncertain the future appears right now, that’s the only future worth betting your life on, really.
Word Power, Heliculture
Word Power
Building Your Vocabulary, One Word at a Time
Heliculture
heliculture (hell ih cult yer) n the art, science, practice and folklore of raising snails
About a year and a half ago, we adopted a snail we found on a plant at Sylvandale’s Garden Supply here in Redway. They were going to kill it, so we decided to give it another lease on life, and took it home as a pet. For a while, we kept it in a big jar with cheesecloth over the lid, and fed it lettuce leaves.
Amy misted it with a squirt bottle every day, which usually motivated it to come out of its shell and climb around for a while. After a while, it seemed lonely. I don’t exactly know why it seemed that way to us, but we went back to Sylvandale’s to see if we could find another one. We did, and they hit it off immediately. We often found them resting right next to each other, shell to shell.
When we just had one snail, we called it “Snail Friend”, but when we added the new one, we named them Simon and Garfunkle. We chose those names because of how quiet our new pets are, which reminded us of Simon and Garfunkle’s hit song “The Sounds of Silence”. At first Garfunkle, aka “Snail Friend”, the one we had the longest, was much larger than Simon, but they both grew rapidly.
Eventually we found a nice little aquarium with a fitted lid and transferred the snails into it. They really seemed to like the new digs, which had a nice layer of soil on the bottom, a couple rocks, and a piece of bark to create a diagonal ramp from the bottom corner to the top corner of their enclosure. They continued to grow, and Simon eventually grew to be the larger of the two.
One evening, about two months ago, we noticed them necking rather enthusiastically. We knew they liked each other, but this got to be embarrassing to watch, so we put their aquarium away and gave them some privacy. About a week or so ago, we discovered dozens of tiny gray ovoid shaped masses about an eighth of an inch long, all over the inside of the aquarium. Baby snails! We have dozens of baby snails. Now what?
We checked out a book from the library about raising snails for food, titled, cryptically enough, Raising Snails for Food by Jacques Baratou, subtitled, “How to Make Friends With Garden Pests and Develop Them Into The Darlings of the Gourmet’s Table. We’ve done pretty well at the “making friends with garden pests” part, but I’m not sure we’re ready to “develop the darlings”, so to speak. However, I did discover this great word, heliculture.
So, as we weigh our options at this critical juncture, and decide whether or not to join the distinguished ranks of the world’s heliculturalists, let me share a few photos of the proud new parents, and their babies, as well as a few facts I’ve learned about snail ranching:
Snails have the most complicated sexual apparatus in the animal kingdom, and they are all hermaphroditic
Snail ranchers ride specially bred horses that don’t run very fast, but are very careful about where they put their hooves down.
In France, snails have the right-of-way. Occasionally, french snail herders will have to cross a major road with their herd. This can tie up traffic for hours.
Snail rodeos, where snail ranchers show off their snail-handling skills, and compete for prizes, have become high-stakes sporting events that draw competitors from all over the world. However, few spectators have the patience to sit through a snail rodeo, and as a result, the sport remains extremely obscure, outside of helicultural circles.
I Report From the Paris Air Show
A Report From the Paris Air Show
The Future of Air Travel
I took a flight to France last week to attend the Paris Air Show. Not because I’m in the market for an aircraft, or even find them that interesting, but just to get my junk touched.
I love Paris, especially in the summertime. While I’m not very good with the language, I always find the French very warm, friendly and welcoming, at least compared to SoHum. Sipping a Pernod at the Brasserie Balzar on Rue des Ecole in my red Nebraska Cornhuskers sweatshirt, I feel completely at home.
“Qui a laissé que étron dans mon café? “” I hear one patron say to another, motioning towards me.
I smile, wave and respond “Je ne sais pas, comme la plupart des étrons, j’ai été abandonnée par ma mère à la naissance.”
”Et telle une odeur horrible” he continues.
“Vrai”, I say, “Je ne sens rien puisque comme un enfant une fusée a volé jusqu’à mon nez.” Like I said, I’m not that good with the language, but that seemed to work. I return to my writing. Much as I love France, the French people, and Paris, I have a job to do.
Every two years, at the historic airfield where Charles Lindbergh landed the Spirit of St. Louis. Aircraft manufacturers around the world bring their latest creations to dazzle the public and write some contracts. From Mercedes’ newest corporate helicopter, to the giants of the skies from Boeing and Airbus, at the Paris Air Show we see the future of air travel on display. At least a future they’d like us to believe.
From what I saw at the Paris Air Show, the future of air travel looks very bright indeed. They showed a magnificent plane with a transparent fuselage and a wide, spacious cabin. Roomy seats with ample armrests, reclined all the way back, to form flat cots. With wide aisles, panoramic views and plenty of leg room, the inside of this very luxurious plane looked more the lobby of a resort hotel, than any airliner I’ve flown in.
From what I experienced on my flight to Paris, however, the future of air travel seems quite bleak. I don’t really think that technological hurdles prevent airlines from providing amenities to air travelers today. In fact, airlines have cut many more perks than they’ve added in recent years, a trend I think likely to continue into the future. How will airlines treat you, the flying public, in 2025? I shudder to think.
After stripping, and submitting to a full body cavity search, you board the plane nude, where a flight attendant will shackle you to your seat. The flight attendant will hang a large ziplock bag, emblazoned with the airline’s logo, around your neck, containing your (or more likely, somebody else’s) clothes and shoes. Flight attendants now demand strict discipline. You will obey them, or they will punish you.
A string of airliner hijackings and bombings in the late twenty-teens, led to these invasive new security procedures, but not a single airliner has been hijacked since the mandatory “strip, shtumpf, and shackle” policy took effect in 2020. However, since the new system went into effect, thousands of passengers suffer long term symptoms of PTSD as a result of routine flights.
Very few people fly anymore with out the aid of significant medication, making in-flight conversation much more surreal. Air sickness remains a problem, complicated by medication and increased stress. Flight attendants provide a complimentary sani-wipe, in a foil envelope emblazoned with the airline’s logo, to every passenger when they release the shackles at your destination.
Dazed and disoriented, you wipe yourself off, struggle to put on whatever clothes you find in the bag, and try to remember who you are and where you are going. Smart travelers long ago learned that they could avoid a lot of trouble and expense by simply buying new clothes at their destination. But you, the inexperienced traveler, proceed to the baggage claim carrousel in hopes of finding your luggage.
By the time TSA screeners have have examined, and pilfered the contents of your bag, and airline baggage handlers have manhandled, dropped and run-over your bag with a forklift, what you see on the carrousel looks more like a giant pile of dirty laundry, with a bunch of open suitcases thrown in. after an hour or so of picking your belongings from the ever revolving heap, you feel you’ve found enough of your wardrobe to get through a few days. Then you collapse, sobbing, and curl up into a fetal position on the floor of the airport terminal for a few hours. You’ll probably be OK… eventually. Thank you for flying the friendly skies.
I think I’ll walk next time, thanks anyway.
See you back in Humboldt!
Andrew Goff, Romano Gabriel Win Me a Sundae
Andrew Goff, Romano Gabriel Win Me a Sundae
I wrote the following letter to Andrew Goff in response to a 70Heaven comic strip he did a month or so ago, that made fun of Romano Gabriel. In the strip, Will, the dumb one, disses a bunch of public art, then praises Romano Gabriel’s work as a low budget Disneyland. Pretty much everything Will says in 70Heaven is stupid and wrong, so this amounted to damning with faint praise, in my mind.
Romano deserves better than that. It pissed me off. So, I posted a message on Andrew Goff’s fb page that said something like, “Will’s right, that other art is shit compared to Romano Gabriel.” After a couple of hours I thought better of it, and deleted the post. I then wrote Andrew the following letter and sent it to him as a private message via fb. I asked him to keep it to himself, but when he saw that I sentenced him to death in this blog, he insisted on going public. An edited version of this letter appears in the current (6/16/11) edition of the North Coast Journal.
It won me a sundae! I owe it all to Andrew and Romano, but I’m not sharing.
Dear Andrew,
I’m very sorry about posting obscenity on your facebook page (last Thursday). My only excuse is that seeing you make fun of Romano Gabriel made me very emotional.
Are you Italian, Andrew? You look Italian. You have a Roman nose. If you’re Italian, be proud! If not, pretend. I know Italian-Americans get a bad rap, especially with liberals, because of Christopher Columbus and the Mafia. A lot of Italian guys try to pass themselves off as French, especially in a liberal college town like Arcata. Your last lame doesn’t end in an “o” or “i” so you could probably pull it off, especially hanging out with a guy named “Startaire.”
Your “Public Art” strip was very French. The French are snooty, critical and heady. They have tiny fluffy balls that they compensate for by putting on an air of superiority. Italians, on the other hand, have a glint in their eye, and gigantic balls to back it up. I think the guy who wrote Prodigal Arkley, is Italian.
I know you are an artist. As an Italian-American artist, you should take great pride in Romano Gabriel. Look at his work. Do you see any brush strokes that look like he’s trying to cover a mistake? Do you see any evidence that he is imitating anyone else? Do you see any evidence that he was motivated by money or fame? Doesn’t every brush stroke look like it was done joyfully, with authority, according to a unique vision with complete disregard for public opinion? Wouldn’t you like to live that way? Do you think you have the balls?
Romano Gabriel is a great Italian-American artist. There’s a reason he’s world famous and has his own museum. Count yourself fortunate to have seen his work. Take inspiration from him. Then check out Saman (or Sam or Simon) Rodia and the Watts Towers. These men didn’t need a college education, grants, or even commissions to make the world take note of their work. They just had a glint in their eye, and gigantic Italian balls. These are your people Andrew, be proud of them.
I fear you spend too much time around HSU. Universities tend to wussify people. It takes balls to be an artist. You don’t need balls to be a critic. You don’t need balls to be a historian, you don’t need balls to teach. That’s why Universities turn out so many critics, historians, and teachers, and so few artists.
There’s nothing stupid about Romano Gabriel’s artwork. What’s stupid is being impressed by the technique, sophistication, and professionalism of vain French pussy artists. Roman Gabriel’s work is not “tacky and embarrassing” or a “public service”. Duane Flatmo is a “public service”. Romano Gabriel was a public nuisance! Do you have the balls to be a nuisance, Andrew? Romano doesn’t care if you make fun of his work, plenty of idiots did so during his lifetime. It’s you I’m worried about.
Other than that, I love 70heaven. Keep up the good work!
Sincerely, John Hardin
P.S. Let’s keep this man to man. I have enough enemies without stirring up French people and feminists.
P.S.S. I’m only one-quarter Italian, and I’m also one-quarter French.
Like You've Got Something Better To Do 