STARTING AT THE LI PO BAR

The Li Po bar on Grant Ave., Chinatown, San Francisco still has the atmosphere of strangeness and intrigue associated with that quarter of the city at certain times in its history. I once went to a BLADE RUNNER party there. The setting fit the subject matter perfectly.

Juan "Bob" Chan asked that I meet him at Li Po at midnight the other night...he had agreed to show me a portal into the Chinatown (and Druid Heights) underworld. He showed up drunk and late but he insisted on being my guide anyway. I am sworn to secrecy as to the alley, and subsequently, the building we entered. Both were "guarded" by "guards" one would never suspect of providing security. He insisted, however, that these guards were more than capable of performing this service.

Inside the building, we walked down several flights of stairs, the into a huge (I think) pitch black room. I was led across the room and through a series of doors. Finally, we emerged into what seemed like a hanger sized mall of mystery and corruption. I felt like I had been transported into a living movie about Shanghai in the 30s.

The fictitious version of this place that I have been creating for the setting of a Benny Pristine mystery pales in the face of what I saw and experienced that night. As expected there were opium parlors, casinos, bars and brothels. Also, among other things, there were betting rooms which featured animal fights and human fights to the death. This used to be common in Asia (and may still be...underground) but has "officially" fallen from favor. Live sex shows of every kind abounded.

Juan Bob's purpose for bringing me here was to introduce to a "real" San Francisco private eye. "Benny Pristine nothing...you got to meet this guy! I take you if you keep mouth shut!" So much for that. Of course, I am changing things around enough so that no place nor anybody is in any real danger of being exposed by any of this. A version of this apparently did happen, however. Anyway, that night Juan introduced me to the "Detective With No Name". This guy reminded me of Orson Welles in "Touch Of Evil"...same overweight, unshaven, dirty white suit, straw hat, I've seen it all more than twice look. He talked...I listened...

More later.

STRANGE CATS

This blog talks about some strange cats...among other things,

ANDY WARHOL

I am sure that I am not the first to make the observation that Andy Warhol would have loved the internet in general and blogs in particular. He predicted that in the future everybody would be famous for 15 minutes. What about being able to instantly publish your diary and photo album to a worldwide audience with the click of a mouse. Put yourself out there! The slick graphics make everybody look immediately "official". And with a little more effort everybody can make and publish their own music and movies too. Everybody can expose themselves...every minute of their mundane existence...via webcam...if they wish. Talk about long, boring movies with not much happening. Be your own star right now! Right up Andy's alley. Of course, if everybody's on stage who is left to watch? Godard said that for a film to exist it needed an audience. He did not say "potential" audience.

PLUMPJACK, JAMES BOND and ELVIS

More wonderings on the ontological status of fictitious characters.

Take Sir John Falstaff for instance. This Shakespearean invention seems to have taken on a life of his own...turning up in other plays after Shakespeare"s death. The character would not be silenced! How does the status of such a character compare to say the status of a ghost, supposedly the residue of a "real" person/persona? Most ghosts which persist are the stuff of story, legend and sometimes myth. They have been "storified" and "characterized" in much the same way that a character in a play has been written and then performed. Only in reverse. The theatrical character is written first and then acted out. The "real" person usually acts first. These actions then become a part of the person's biography...personal history...and then ghosthood.

I wonder if anyone has ever reported a ghostly haunting by Plumpjack. Could there be? If the story were told...and believed...that Jack Falstaff was based on a real person...could he then be allowed to haunt his favorite tavern? Of course, the question of a soul will be brought up by some. What is a ghost made of anyway? Maybe only memory. Perhaps the cry should go out across the land, "Free the ghost of Plumpjack Falstaff!" On the other hand, maybe this is all nonsense.

What about James Bond? Elvis, of course, does not have a problem...

BOB DYLAN

Saw the first half of "No Direction Home" last night. I confirmed what we already probably knew. "Bob Dylan" is a trickster, shape-shifter actor-shaman. Dave Van Ronk, Liam Clancey and others said as much. "It was not necessary for him to be a particular person. You can go anywhere when you're somebody else." He seems to make him self up as he goes along, constantly re-writing his personal history as he did in the beginning of his career in NYC. I guess a lot of performers do this. They understand, far more than most, that "ordinary life" itself is a performance. I mention this here because this is one of the main things SATORI TANGO is about.

DADA DISTRIBUTION

I need to go to Zurich. I haven't been there in over 20 years. I have always identified with Dada.

The Dada movement was founded in Zurich at the Cabaret Voltaire on Feb. 5, 1916.
As S.S. Fair states in "Gaga for Dada": "Dada and its guerilla theatrics tweaked the snouts of Europe's sacred cows, generating so much provocation and intrigue that it instantly permeated every aspect of modern art." (see www.cabaretvoltaire.ch)
Cabaret Voltaire, rescued from the developer's wrecking ball by the chief executive of Swatch, has been restored and opened to the public as a living monument to all things Dada.

More about Dada, Surrealism and their precursors (e.g. Alfred Jarry's pataphysics) later.

One distribution strategy for SATORI TANGO...inspired by Dadaist, Situationist strategies...guerilla marketing and distribution...of Limited Edition only (along with giving copies to friends)...prior to more conventional approaches...there can be no attachment to results...below are some practitioners...to get a whiff of the aroma of rare "lost objects"...

Sunday, September 25, 2005 NY Times, Arts and Leisure section.
SHOPGIFTING
A conceptual artist’s retail strategy: buy clothes, return art.
Zoe Sheehan Saldana buys items of clothing at Wal Mart, creates her own handmade versions of them, replaces the original labels and price tags then smuggles them back into the store to be bought by the ordinary customer.
Ms. Sheehan Saldana, a West Village artist and Baruch College art professor, is a shop-dropper. Shop-dropping, also known as "reverse shoplifting", involves the addition of hand-made imitations of generic merchandise to a store’s stock. It is a nascent artistic phenomenon with a nationwide network of devotees.

www.queasylistening.com
"Lost Objects" is our attempt to provide that chance encounter: it is the logical, desparate and dadaistic endpoint of our angst - the apotheosis of our disdain for the record business - conceptually, a "Lost Object" is the aesthetic isomer of the "Found Object". "Lost Objects", initially anyway, are original recordings by artists on the Queasy Listening label that are to be tactically secreted at various symbolic locations, it is envisaged, both in the UK and abroad. Each discarded recording will be professionally produced and packaged, but distributed in very limited editions. Each release will be itemised in our catalogue for the intrepid butterfly collector, but unavailable for mass-consumption. In all likelihood, the recipient of that object will have no knowledge of it's origin or intention. These recordings may even be camouflaged by an innocous veneer, all the more to entice an unwitting 'victim' to touch it's poisonous tendrils...

www.droplift.org
But what about someone who sneaks into a record store and leaves a CD behind? Droplifting, a trend that began in Chicago, is the opposite of shoplifting: sonic collagists, hounded by what they consider unfair copyright laws, are now stealthily placing their own CDs in stores next to titles by Madonna and 'N Sync, hoping to subvert the established avenues of music distribution. They may not cause a revolution, and they certainly won't make any money off it. But they are chipping away at archaic laws and frustrating the cupidity of the record business.

"The recording industry pursues a legal stranglehold on work which is essentially done by marginal artists and crackpots," says Tim Maloney, aka Naked Rabbit, a Los Angeles collagist and the person responsible for coordinating the Droplift Project. "There is a one-way communication, in which we are all overloaded with stimulus from the corporate owners of culture but are unable to talk back to it in any meaningful way. It's not just frustrating for those who want to talk back at it, it's bad for our culture."

The Droplift Project isn't the first to utilize guerilla distribution tactics. According to Richard Holland, one of the leaders of the project, he and his band, Institute for Sonic Ponderance, secretly placed their CDs at Tower Records, Best Buy, and the Quaker Goes Deaf. The Droplift Project has expanded the scheme; its recent self-titled release was limited to a pressing of 1,000 copies, but through droplifting, underground radio, and the project's Web site (www.droplift.org), its music has spread ac
ross the U.S. and Europe.

www.ztrainmusic.com
Z Train Productions
Every Tuesday night, I’d go to some corner market with a Xerox machine and crank out 200 photocopies of each comic. There were a lot of black spaces on my comics, and the proprietors would scowl because I used up all their toner.

Every Wednesday morning, I’d walk up and down Haight Street and insert the latest Funny Water in the back page of new issues of The Guardian and SF Weekly. After a few weeks, store owners and patrons recognized me as the Funny Water kid. At that point, any recognition felt good.

One day, I received a letter from an Oregon cult, who picked up a Funny Water from the sidewalk during their weekend trip to the historic Haight. They enclosed a dollar and requested other issues. I sent them the motherlode but never heard back.

And so it goes...

DON MORANO

On Saturday I had a long and enjoyable phone conversation with philosopher, attorney, and friend Don Morano in Chicago re SATORI TANGO. I had sent him a copy and value his opinion greatly so I had been anxious to hear what he thought. He said, among other things, that it brought to mind Luigi Pirandello ("Six Characters In Search Of An Author") and Lewis Carroll. He also said that he had read it in one sitting (which is recommended) and that its non-linear, layered structure (palimpsest) allowed him to "take a trip" for a couple of hours away from his ordinary, linear reality...and that the trip was a stimulating and pleasant one. His comments were very encouraging. He also thought that I should try to get it into stores by Christmas in its present large format, signed and numbered form.
(Morano's assignment in a philosophical ideas in literature course, in which I was a student, some forty years ago: Write a essay on the ontological status of the characters in Luigi Pirandello's "Six Characters In Search Of An Author", provided one starting place for SATORI TANGO. Alan Watts provided another.)

CHINATOWN TUNNELS

This is from Dr. Weirde on SFGate.com and gives you some idea of the strangeness surrounding the whole thing.
I guote:

C h i n a t o w n :
An Underground Labyrinth?

Throughout the 19th century, rumor had it that a byzantine labyrinth of tunnels had been constructed beneath the streets of Chinatown. The tunnels supposedly allowed "oriental gangsters" and other sinister types to mysteriously vanish whenever cops kicked in the door to one of their opium dens or slave-girl pens. Various witnesses claimed to have actually passed through these tunnels, and the police and city authorities were convinced that the tunnels existed. But when Chinatown burned down in the Great Fire of 1906, no tunnels were found amidst the ruins. What happened to the tunnels?

Most historians have concluded that the Chinatown tunnels were a myth. But other, weirder theories have been proposed. One has it that since the tunnels could only be entered through trap-door stones in the floors of basements, the evidence of their existence was buried beneath the rubble after the earthquake and fire. An even weirder theory claims that the tunnels never physically existed, but were locations where magickal adepts could be "channeled" or teleported from one spot to another. The occultists who have proposed this notion claim that the witnesses who have traveled in the tunnels were actually led by Chinese magicians into holes beneath various buildings, where quartz crystals and copper conductors -the lodestones of Chinese spiritual alchemy- were used to focus the operator's psychic energy to the point where teleportation could occur.

DRUID HEIGHTS

DRUID HEIGHTS

Benny Pristine and his friends and associates live and work in the Druid Heights neighborhood of San Francisco. You won't find Druid Heights on the tourist maps. The Druid Heights District, as it was originally called, was created during the gold rush (late 1840s) and became an increasingly "interesting", exclusive and carefully guarded section of the city. (It should not be confused with the Druid Heights colony formed one hundred years later by Elsa Gidlow on Mt. Tamalpias in Marin County, which later became the location of Alan Watts' legendary circular house.)

The original Druid Heights District included (and still includes) streets, alleys and narrow walkways which are now in the Chinatown, North Beach, Nob Hill and Russian Hill neighborhoods of San Francisco. Additionally, Druids Heights is riddled with tunnels, still usable, which served a variety of purposes in gold rush days. The whereabouts of these tunnels is a closely guarded secret among those who still identify Druid Heights as their place of residence. This, of course, includes Benny, Moondog, Quantum Coyote, Crysta Bella and Zeno Murray.

Druid Heights also houses a number of subterranean bars, brothels and casinos which have been in operation since they opened in 1849. The urban legend about an underground Chinatown is actually referring largely to the Druid Heights "street" system, although it was enlarged by the Chinese of the day for their own purposes.

Druid Heights itself, as we shall see, is an important "character" in the Benny Pristine Mysteries as they unfold following the Satori Tango adventure.

WHAT THIS BLOG IS ABOUT

Satori Tango is the name of an illustrated novella which I am publishing in a limited, signed and numbered edition. The novella continues to follow the exploits of old school San Francisco private detective Benny Pristine. The first Benny Pristine Mystery was chronicled in the independent feature "American Eyeball" which had film festival play in 2001. In Satori Tango, Benny becomes entangled in "the wierdest case of my career." He is hired by an extremely wealthy and extremely eccentric woman to find the meaning of life, which seems to be missing...or else.

This blog will expose bits of the story...which continues after the novella "ends", readers' comments and criticisms, and the progress of the novella's distribution.

Comments are welcome and may be made either via this blog or directly to:

satoritango@yahoo.com

Charles Webb