Anonymity

Anonymity on the web is what turned me off to trying to engage in meaningful dialogue. The Santa Fe New Mexican web site forums are suppose to be used by people using their "full real names." But the place is inhabited by cowardly jerks using fake names to trash, bait, flame, slander, deflect and "fnord" (disinformation or irrelevant information intending to misdirect, with the implication of a conspiracy). "Fnord" is a word coined by Anton Wilson, the father of Luna Wilson who I have written about in this blog.


By Donado Coviello (Submitted: 06/17/2008 1:36 pm)

If there is no way to enforce rules there shouldn't be any. Rule 5. You must use your real full name when posting. Without the delete button The New Mexican is completely responsible for any slander that occurs here with the intended malice of allowing certain selected fake named posters to be protected. Of course this site has descended to the lowest common denominator ... declining in value proportionally with anonymity. We were also suppose to be able to interact with the staff and reporters. When was the last time anyone has seen that occur? Think about all the people that have left this forum and the quality of the discourse now compared to the past.


Every time I go to the New Mexican's "Newspaper Ethics section there are no articles. No Stories ... no ethics, I guess.

Fissy

I had to take down the posts about Star and Luna. My heart inside my chest was exploding. In the "Burning" post below, the photo shows SuperJoel picketing for the underpaid workers. He is flank by Eugenia Butler (left) and her daughter Fissy (on the right).

I just keep burning writings, drawings, pictures and "media" in the fireplace. As I am burning the papers of pleasure and pain it reminds me of lyrics from one of the few songs I wrote during those days in the Berkeley ... "The fire that warms, Your house in a storm, Will cause you to mourn, When it burns your house down." And when I think of Fissy's friendship I repeat the chorus "Sunshine please keep me high, Moonshine don't ever die, Don't ever die."


As I find these pictures of long past relationships what I don't burn in the cleansing fire I'll send to their rightful owners, that's if I can find them. And after my wife reads this blog of mine, I'll probably have to take this post down also but with my two, soon to be, newly broken arms.

"There's alot of bobbing and weaving ..."

We arranged for the kid to talk to the cops. The cops picked up the suspect in Luna's murder, then they let him go. Even though the guy live across the bay in San Franciso, the information that the suspect was released and free quickly got back to the East Bay.

I called the detective from Henry and Clover's pad. The cop explained that "There was a lot of bobbing and weaving in a murder investigation."



A couple of days later the story broke in the newspaper that they had arrest the Indian guy for Luna's murder. In the news story the police said that this crime had really upset the community and that they, the police, got help from a section of the community that usually wasn't co-operative.

A few days later there was a memorial for the our slain friend with Tim Leary. Luna's girl friends performed an interpertive dance to honor her. I didn't go ... I don't know why, I just couldn't.

When you google Luna's name what you learn is that her brain was placed in a frozen cryogenic state. I think that like all thing on the Internet, you learn nothing about the person nor what is true or spiritual about their lives.

There was sometime about watching some of the kids and people grow up in Berkeley through the seventies. Some like Luna, David D., Kathy D., Groovie, SuperJoel and many others didn't make it. I found out be chance others like; Spacely, Marcy, Jimmy Butler, Vanessa,and Clover did make it. Annelise, I don't know but I sense Star made and is happy somewhere... I hope so.


Star marbling.

Sitting Around Doing Coke

The next night, in shock, I walked over to my connection's house on Derby. We sat around and since I didn't have any money they laid out some lines and gave me an import beer. I cleaned their pot tray and scrounged a couple of joints from the scrug. I thought about the time Adam came gunning for Henry and I stashed Henry and Clover and waited here in this house without curtains until the cops came.

We sat around doing coke trying to figure out who could have killed Luna. After all we had so many eyes on Telegraph Avenue where the murder happened. Luna had been beaten on the head with a portable charge card machine. You know, one of those sliding metal arm devices that would imprint the credit card onto a carbon backed sales slips.

We talked about any new comers to the Street. Any even more than normal weirdoes hanging out. Somebody mentioned a guy who called himself "Lord somebody" or "Sir somebody" that was getting too familiar too quick for everyone's taste. Maybe it was the coke, maybe it made us feel like wired Sherlock Holmes' but we agreed I would call the cops and tell them of our suspicions.

The detective I talked to was interested but not impressed. We really didn't know if the weird guy on the street was an infiltrator, cop or transient. I hung up thinking the cop knew who we were and we were grasping at straws.

Then the kid came in. He was a real runaway, one of the street kids that really did have something to lose dealing with the cops. To our amazement he described going to the store where Luna worked and thinking it was strange that the door was locked during business hours. He looked in the window and saw a big guy and no Luna.

Our jaws dropped. The kid was describing the former boyfriend of the storeowner, a big Native American guy with a grudge and who like to drink.

I called the detective back and said, "We got him." I told the cop the story the kid had related; the time line; the relationship to the storeowner; and that the kid was very frightened.
"Keep him calm,” the cop said. Sure, easy for you to say I thought.

Horror

It was a scream. More like "Oh No. NO."
The word flowed, rumbled through the crowd.
Luna was dead.
All I remember is Star running out of the house.
I can't recall anything after that for a day or so.
I really don't think I saw Star ever again.

Can Love Ever Be A Mistake?

When speaking of the past is it just as bad to worry over mistakes than to remember its glory?



I loved many people during my time in Berkeley; had many friends; had sex with many people; desired and didn't have sex with many others. In a post-free-love pre-AIDS anti-romantic drugged-out it was hard to stay clear in the polluted land of the radical and home of the revolutionary I called Bezerkeley.



Annelise, for me there is a responsibility that comes with even the mention of someone's name on the Internet. I have to believe that as I am talking to you I am talking to Star and millions of other people. I know that every second 5 new bloggers around the world come on line. I also know no one cares about what I write especially concerning my feelings.

So as I remember back to that night in 1976 when my friends and I gathered to celebrate among other things Patricia Luna Wilson's birthday, I think of personal fragility. How life can all fall apart and never return together.




At the party I mingled with many of the Telegraph Avenue regulars. Star and her young friends were in the other room. I had now known Star for a couple of years and believed her to be special and extraordinary. Luna and she had a special relationship that just for me, many years later as I thought about the two young women's spiritual relationship, they seem almost interchangeable or binary.

Don't get me wrong both Star and Luna were complete individuals but were connected. And as much as I respected the wise-for-her-age Luna ... I loved Star.

"Where is Luna?" the first questions at the Party were being asked.
"It's not like her to miss her own party", the comments continued as it got later.
"She worked today, didn't she?"

Walking Backward Into The Future

Some people believe the past is in front of us because we can see it and the future behind us because we can't. So when I think of Star, Luna, SuperJoel, Groovie Bewildered Dead, Vanessa, Kathy Soliah, the Ziprins, Smacky Beary (Jackie Leary), Henry and Clover and all the people of 1976 Berkeley ... I think I'm walking backward into the future.

Of course I want to talk to all of them again. Some I can't because they're gone and I'm still here. Some I have spoken with and others I cry to. But to answer Annelise directly I do not know what happened to Catherine Star, I wish I did. I hallucinated her while I was walking on a beach a year ago. That in combination with other events led me to quit smoking pot after forty years of doing so.



But in 1976 on Oct 2nd in Berkeley, California there was to be a party, a birthday party. It was to be a mix of different group young and older; gay and straight; drugies and drinkers with the guest of honor being Luna.

1976 - Berkeley

1976 in Berkeley was strange in that I can remember the flavor of bi-centennial year on the main street of a counter-culture's capital city. I can remember the color of the marbleized fabric I sold on the Fourth of July on Telegraph Avenue. I remember the long summer of urban living without a chance for escape. I was spending time making art, doing drugs and getting hit on by all manor of people.

I was underground and had not spoken to my family in five years. I lived off of Grove Street which was a mostly a black middle-class neighborhood. My home which was actually a hand made structure we called the "rocket ship” was in a Olaf's backyard on Ward street. For a while I had a store called Paradise Cove that was on Grove Street on the other side of University Avenue. I had friends who had a store down the street and another friend lived right around the corner. Her friends, that introduced us, had lived with Tim Leary in Millbrook, NY and my friends were then living with Jackie Leary, Tim's son.



Luna’s father was close with Tim Leary and in what was really a small town there were little and few degrees of separations.

As you can see I will write about anything; go off in any tangent or direction; describe connections, name drop or pretend I am a writer just to avoid telling you how I actually felt about some of my friends and what happen to Luna.

Star and Her Friend Luna

I must have tried a thousand times to write the story of the last time I saw Star.

Just as this blog brought the news of SuperJoel's passing to me, the posting of a comment by Annelise here is somehow driving me to look at a moment in my life that was so powerful and meaningful as to make me question all of how I lived my life.

Star was young girl I met in Berkeley. She originally was a friend to an extended family that I was part.

Annelise, I too was in the play you mentioned and your comment started me looking for pictures and writings I have saved that were about that time, my friendships, my loves, and my work as an artist.



I have for years looked for a certain photo of Star, Luna and I talking on Telegraph Avenue. It is gone but I see it.

Telegraph was a universe unto itself. I would sell my art and humanity would pass by.
"Programs, Programs ... You can't tell the agents without a Program, Program", I would say to nameless people going on their way.

Beside the homeless kids and the Red Rockets, a group of young teenage children of Berkeley radicals that were called the Mini-Mob, there were more middle class kids who
hung out on the "Ave." One of those kids was Star and another was her best friend Luna.

Luna was the 15-year daughter of writer Robert Anton Wilson. She worked part time at a little clothing store just down the corner from where I sold my art on the fence in front of the vacant lot where the old "Telegraph Hilton' once stood.

I will not be able to tell you in one, two, ten ...a hundred sittings the story of that one day, what had occurred before and after. I struggle out of love and respect for the young ladies and what after almost 35 years still would have to be trauma for Star and loss for everyone. But I will try.

(continued tomorrow)

The Fab Book: Joe The Poet

The Fab Book: A Fiction...Chapter #1



Disclaimer: Joe Poet gave me permission to use his name and writings from that era.
Famous Joe the Poet gave me permission to use his name but I'm not sure he gave me permission to use a picture of him giving the peace sign.
The actual "Fab Book" is in parts and is in boxes resting at maxium entropy. Its story and pictures are a record of a frozen frame of time... just like marbling.
Enter Joe Samberg, Famous Joe the Poet, Country Joe and SuperJoe; as well as Groovy, Spacely, Teske, Sunday, Colo, Olaf, Miller, Star and Luna, Drips, ....plus many other famous and not so famous people and stories flow together like hippie marbling.
All people are real albeit with some name changes. Also, once in a while I lie.