TRITON HOTEL … I’ve always loved our Telluride Mushroom Festival for its archaic roots. How it takes us back to our ancestral memory of hunting and gathering – what we as a species did best for 90,000 years. Becoming future primitives.

Out in the woods. On a search for food, fun and poison … But last week Mushfest took me by jet to my native home of San Francisco, for a documentary shoot with Ron Mann of Toronto-based Sphinx Productions (Twist, Grass, Go Further, www.indiewire.com/onthescene/onthescene_040210berl.html) and his gifted cameraman/editor Simon Ennis. With a makeshift tent flap and faux festival poster, a Richmond-district backyard of overgrown grass and winter alyssum became Elks Park, while I read scripts for voiceovers and ad-libbed my way through some mid-editing linkage scenes to fill out the mushroom movie Mann’s making with Gary Lincoff and Larry Evans as Virgils guiding the film’s Dantean eye through the 13 layers of mycelial wisdom set amidst a full-on Mushfest weekend … For a trailer of Mann’s shroom movie-to-be, visit sphinxproductions.com/pages/mushroom_trailer.html … I’m used to cheap Day’s Inns or conference Hiltons, since about the only time I stay in paid lodging occurs on political trips. So, staying at the upscale Triton on Grant across the street from the city’s ornate gate to Chinatown and just up the hill from Union Square was a special treat … And I got to eat cut-rate Hunan at the raunchy New King Tin Restaurant on Washington, walking the deserted late night streets of a rainy Chinatown … But the biggest thrill was sneaking off with my old buddy Kerry Yates, an inveterate Bay Area musician, to Yoshi’s Sushi and Jazz Club in the East Bay for front row seats on the Taj Mahal Trio. What a show! Taj is a musical master, and he was in top form. Caribbean, Hawaiian, African, Latin, and Cuban sounds and rhythms mixed with folk, jazz, zydeco, gospel, rock, pop, soul, and R&B, all layered on top of a solid country blues foundation. The house was packed, and it felt like heaven. Maybe his trio will come back ’round and visit us in the mountains. But this time the mountain went to visit Taj, and the mountain was moved.

NEW BLOG … We’re moving into a new cyber world; www.artgoodtimes.blogspot.com is the place to go to read back issues of “Up Bear Creek” in the Telluride Watch and “Around the Cone” in the Norwood Nucla Naturita Watch – more goodtimes, twice a week.

PYNCHON … You may not be a fan of the Cornell don of American fiction, but I am. V was a breakthrough book for me, as was Gravity’s Rainbow, Vineland. And the early Crying of Lot 49 is still etched in glass in the penthouse mural of my mind … Well, now comes Against the Day (thank you, Gabe Lifton-Zoline), his latest blockbuster – a crushing 1,085 pages of pyrotechnic prose set in the fin-de-siècle America West and including a couple of Telluride originals: Webb Traverse, dynamiter, and Veikko Rautavaara, “veteran of the Coeur d’Alene bullpens and the strike in Cripple Creek for the eight-hour day” … Highly recommended.

KAY RYAN … My quirky neo-formalist poet-goddess Wendy Videlock (published in the archly traditionalist Poetry lit-zine several times) shared Kay Ryan’s poetry book Elephant Rocks (Grove Press, New York, 1996) with me a year or two ago, and I finally got around to reading it … Amazing! Little choice knots of language that playfully riddle you into threads and seams of meaning that twist and ravel and unravel right before your eyes … “Intention doesn’t sweeten / It should be picked young / and eaten” … “other people are / mussels or clams, frightened. / Steam or knife blades mean open. / They hear heaven, they think boiled or broken” … “You aren’t swept up whole, / however it feels. You’re / atomized. The wind passes. You recongeal. It’s / a surprise” … Highly recommended.

NOT GOOD NEWS … According to the National Association of Police Chiefs and Sheriffs, the murder rate from 2004-2006 went up 10.2 percent coast-to-coast … The percentage of Americans living in extreme poverty was at a 26-year low when Bush took office. It’s now at a 32-year high … Gary Harmon of Grand Junction’s Daily Sentinel doesn’t think much of national intel assessment that Iran isn’t pursuing nuclear arms parity with the West at this point. And he’s probably right. Any country with nuclear enemies must want to be able to match force with force, ultimately … So, even as much as I think this administration’s push for a pre-emptive strike on Tehran is madness (and I hope this intel report helps blunt that effort), still I think it’s likely we are entering a world arena where more than just our allies will be brandishing a nuclear fist. Which, should, I think, lead us to greater international cooperation – not less.

© 2007 Art Goodtimes

THE TALKING GOURD

Ritter

The Governor

polished off

questions

like

some would

silver

eagles screaming

in his eye’s

gleam.