Posts from — May 2007

Having searched high and low for my fine friend, John C. Pray, aka Sanjuro, I’ve just about given up hope of finding him. Repeated scourings of the net turn up no hits, so I’ve decided to provide some of my own in the hopes that he might find me one of these days.

Sanjuro was a real one-of-a-kind. Surrealist, Haiku poet, social critic, Japanophile, former alcoholic and all-around gonzo journalist of the dust-blasted Albuquerque desert. We met as mutual wage slaves of the Dayton-Hudson Corporation, which owned B. Dalton Booksellers, the Albuquerque branch being New Mexico’s largest bookstore back in 1983. Our co-workers were a bunch of practically (if not verifiably) insane people, including Hugh Callens, Rachel “Moonbat” Dixon, Miss Piggy, Charles Vane, Ben Porter, Walt Carpenter & Marty Dusty Rose Snapless Bird.

We all lived on the nervous edge of the 70s, which had not quite been extinguished down in New Mexico, apprehensive about the technology that seemed to be creeping in from the periphery.

B. Dalton installed modems to send all the sales information to HQ up in Minneapolis every night, which seemed pretty futuristic to me back then. Charles Vane was given a primordial beta testing version of the original Macintosh computer, something like a bastard cross between a toaster and mini-tv set. I drew a doodle on it using MacPaint.

Sanjuro and I frequented the happy hour at Japanese Kitchen which was barely fifty meters from the bookstore. We swapped tales of motorcycling, writing, psychedelic experiences and journalistic feats of derring-do. Sanjuro’s famous incident was the statewide media scoop of Patty Hearst’s capture in 1975 on KUNM radio.

“Out of my way!” he shouted, thrashing the DJ onto the floor and sweeping the needle across the turntable with a fistful of teletype paper. “Breaking News! Patty Hearst, captive of, or conspirator with, the Symbionese Liberation Army, has been captured in Los Angeles.”

What a moment! And how many gin fizzes, tequila sunrises, and straight up shots of Wild Turkey followed… as the years rolled by and the realization sank in: nobody gives a damn about politics, about revolution, about savage covert operations taking place in forsaken backwaters of Central America or in the fetid jungle swamps of American corporate boardrooms.

Another round of bourbon whiskey and let it all ride on the twitching pony with the green nostrils and pupils as big as bowling balls! Because, damn it, if this flea-bitten horse can’t win a race at the State Fair in New Mexico, then it will have to be beer at Okie’s and green chile pizza at Jack’s for the rest of our stinking lives!

What a treasure it is to have a political junkie, poet, and Master of Art History as a drinking buddy!

Of course the alcohol nearly did him in and he had to kick it, but not until he had filtered a decade of hard stuff through his kidneys. And no thanks to the Hawaiian bartender at Japanese Kitchen who was always giving him freebies! For reasons of my own I had as much of a drinking problem as the next guy, but then again, I was already a haggard minimum wage-earning father by the age of 22, whereas John C. Pray was a single guy who managed to invent his own kind of drunken bushido.

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Walking down the street this morning I was thinking about how cultural icons evolve over time. For example, the whole Brazilian Copacabana theme, from Carmen Miranda and her wacky fruit hat, to Chiquita banana commercials,

to some sort of totemic Caribbean dancer that still permeates our tiki-laden zeitgeist. (Interesting side-note, even though Copacabana page on Wikipedia has the totemic image, they don’t mention Carmen Miranda!)

Anyway, I was thinking about the idiotic Monkees theme song, which pretty much runs through my head every morning as I walk under the ominous brimstone-reeking edifice of Harvard Law School–in particular the part where Peter Tork is in a wheeled bathtub scrubbing his back with a brush as the other Monkees push him along the street.

And I thought, oh yeah, they just put that in there because they read Mr. Natural comix where Flakey Foont decides to spend the rest of his life in his bathtub.

Eventually Flakey fixes up his tub with a motor and wheels and shows off to Mr. Natural, with predictable consequences! But then it hit me with a tremendous WHAAM!

The Monkees Show was aired from 1966 to 68, at least one year BEFORE Robert Crumb drew the Mr. Natural episode with Flakey Foont’s bathtub escapade (dated 1969)! Ye Gads! Does that mean R. Crumb was recycling images from the Monkees! Then I started to think about it, and this eerie mind-warping sensation of the curvature of time and space took over my wobbling brain… Exactly where do memes begin, and what is their actual trajectory as they are recycled through pop culture? Where does the bathtub thing begin? Even the Cat-In-The-Hat was eating cake in a tub in 1957! A google revealed that there exists nothing less than a bathtub art museum featuring 100 years of bathtub fixations (okay, must be the nudity), and includes some very weird Scandinavians posing with their sport tubs.

Clearly this is a topic worthy of further study! Should we go back to Diogenes and seek out washbasin allusions throughout history? Perhaps not tonight.

>>>Followup:

oh lordy, check out this amazing chap in Russia!

When you really need some original art, but don’t have time to browse at galleries and zine-fairs, why not get your fix at the nearest Art-0-mat? Made from reconditioned cigaret machines, Art-o-mats (and kindred bots) are serving up some fine eye-candy and poetry relief. Cool and refreshing, with no doormat-mouth aftertaste!For the info-trail curious (or Hansel and Gretel lovers) out there, I found this on the links section of Montreal’s distroboto, which was pointed to from the luckysoap blog of J. R. Carpenter, who spoke recently at the MediaInTransition5 conference. (More MIT5 video is posted at Philippe LeJeune’s videos without a blog.