Renaissance Faire, Hand Pies another Well Met

Hand Pies

Hand pies at the Renaissance Pleasure Faire were as the hawker (myself) would say "tasty little sandwiches you can hold in your hand as you walk the Faire." Or as Jack coined "Hand Pies make you wise."
The Hand Pie booth was magnificently primitive looking as were the hand crafted grilled sandwich makers.  The business of food service is serious. The business of the Faire is "Pleasure" so being a participant and living on the Faire site ... the pleasure came after-hours.

Google image search  Renaissance Faire and you'll find nothing but daytime clean white images of digital perfect abstracted Renaissance Faire. I think the counterculture wanted to be in the future for the change that would happen and wanted to live in some imagined past for the back-to-the-country simplicity life style.

Living in the huge wonderful Gypsy camp call the 'Faire site' during the run of the show was insanely cool. Inside the Faire grounds at night can not be describe easily. Yes it was a set but it felt so real at night. out in the large parking lot it was more like a trailer park but inside there was no electricity and limited fire and not that much battery powered light. It felt like I was in the future on a Starship 'hallow deck' in a super believable computer recreation of well-to-do renaissance community.

Cove as John of Coventry, shopkeep and "Tables' (Backgammon) player

The Fab Book: The Movie

As I have said before, some people believe that the past is in front of us because we can see it and that the future behind us because we can't. So when I think of my days in Berkeley I think I'm walking backward into the future.

I have also stated many times that the Internet blogosphere is no place to tell the truth ... the web is not your lover nor shrink. But I'm like many people who are caught in the modern dilemma of needing to be truthful and yet knowing that in the here and now truth is not really desired.
In America, the 'reality" is people line up at the door to blab every little secret of the their lives and every geeky twit wants mediocre content for free. Even now I try to express my feelings through someone else words or better yet lyrics ... "If my thought dreams could be seen they'd probably put my head in a guillotine."

I can't count the time I have tried to talk about past sex, love or relationships and then wisely decided to just keep my fucking mouth shut. But there is a thread or rather a stream that allows truth to flow and that for me is the art of marbling.*
*After writing that line I thought about it for four weeks before publishing this post. I really not sure that it is true at all being that all art is an illusion and abstraction.

"The Fab Book" is really a book albeit a manuscript that is completely scattered, shattered and resting at maximum entropy. The book is more than a journal or how-to-do-it manual it is a metaphysical speculative film script. What the fuck Cove?


The story of marbling is a ancient mystery with an origin that will never be identified. Because it is a simple basic concept, something float on something else, it could have been observed by earliest observer.

Also as I have said before, nostalgia is the worst form of depression. As I look back with one eye I am trying to look forward with the other. I am hoping to use the infinite possibilities of marbling as an allegory for life.






The Fab Book starts with cartoon (above) and recollection of selling a piece of marbleized art to an assistant to scientist/TV star Carl Segan who was purchasing the 'spacescape' as a gift for his boss Segan. I took the liberty of combining that true story with another one when a dog excised its critique of my art by pissing on it.

Life on the the street as a hippie artist lead to adventures and information and people that I was driven to record.








(draft - to be continued)