Old Friends and Neighbors
Trip Start
Jun 15, 2007
1
20
25
Trip End
Sep 05, 2007
Detroit,
Michigan,
United States
Tuesday, July 31, 2007
The last time I saw Hayes before the Jeffrey Strouss memorial service last week was in Amsterdam, where he's a fairly frequent visitor and celebrant. Hayes is another defender of marijuana felons and other miscreants who's been deeply rooted in Ann Arbor for about 30 years. He and Adam and my daughter Celia and I share a delightful repast at a place around the corner from his office downtown, enjoy quite a few laughs and exhume more than a few great memories before we say goodnight and drive back to Detroit.
The next day is a social one, starting when Bruce Cohen picks me up for lunch, a few pleasant tokes on Belle Isle and our typical drive around the inner city of Detroit to see what landmarks of our younger days have been abandoned, destroyed or removed since our last investigation. Bruce is a native Detroiter from the old school who was a habitué of the Grande Ballroom in its heyday and a rabid follower of the MC5.
When I first knew Bruce he was managing Mickey Shorr's car stereo operation on Woodward Avenue in Ferndale or Royal Oak. He spent quite a few years in Ft. Lauderdale and returned to Detroit in the early '80s, where he now operates a business that produces custom taillights and sound systems for motorcycles. In recent years he keeps close track of my proximities to the Motor City and delights in feeding me, getting me high and driving me around whenever we can find the time while I'm in town.
Wednesday evening brings dinner with Matty Lee, another old friend since the early '80s and also my Detroit publicist whenever I can get a record company or publisher to engage one in my behalf. When I met Matty he was leader of a horn band called The Suspects that played all the places I was booking: B'Stilla, Red Carpet, Sully's in Dearborn, Mr.Christian's in Royal Oak and others. After the group disbanded, Matty spent several years in New York City, ran a used record store in Royal Oak and eventually gravitated to his present career as Detroit's hippest and most effective publicist with his agency called Drumbeaters.
Thanks to the support of my man James Millard, we will soon be able to engage Matty Lee to promote the Michigan Premiere tour with Steve Gebhardt and myself in support of the MVD release of TWENTY TO LIFE in October, which is one of the principal reasons why I'm here in Detroit in August: to set up the dates in Detroit, Ann Arbor, Grand Rapids, Traverse City, Big Rapids, Whitehall (a campaign rally for Steve Salter for City Council) and my home town, Flint, Michigan, where the U.S. Premiere will be staged on my 66th birthday, October 2nd.
So I'm working the phones, writing a million e-mails and doing some little gigs around town with a one-week tour of the western Michigan area set for next week. On Thursday I sit in with Larry Fratangelo's jam band at the Buzz Bar again and on Friday and Saturday I have the rare opportunity to hang out with my dear friend Maribel Restropo, better known now as Mary Ramirez of the Detroit Cobras. The Cobras are on the road for an elongated stretch continuing into September in support of their new album, Tied & True, but all their T-shirts have sold out and Maribel's back in Detroit for four days to get some more made.
Friday evening I'm in Oak Park to visit my pal Cary Loren at his classic BookBeat bookstore, an innocuous-looking storefront in a shopping center at 10-1/2 Mile & Greenfield that's a whole different reality inside. Last fall I wrote a little piece about BookBeat for a magazine that shall remain nameless since they've neither printed it nor paid me a kill fee as of this writing, and I think I'll attach it at the end of this entry to give you something of a picture of this great throwback to the days of real live bookstores operated by people who love literature and art.
Cary was the founder (with Mike Kelley and Jim Shaw) in the early 1970s of the proto-punk Ann Arbor ensemble called Destroy All Monsters, but he's been running the bookstore with his wife for the past 25 years and shows no sign of slowing down. He's published facsimile editions of my mimeographed Artists Workshop Press books from the mid-1960s, THIS IS OUR MUSIC and MEDITATIONS: A Suite for John Coltrane, and resurrected my journals from 1963 from my archive at the University of Michigan to publish a book called PEYOTEMIND plus a CD of the text performed with his band Monster Island.
On August 30th we'll stage a reading of MEDITATIONS in its entirety as a BookBeat homage to John Coltrane, where I'll be joined by Detroit poets James Semark and M.L. Liebler and guitarist Ron English for the evening. Semark and English and I were all active together at the Detroit Artists Workshop some 43 years ago and all are still going strong today (dare I say). Also, Cary is helping Adam Brook and me set up the Detroit premiere of TWENTY TO LIFE at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Detroit (MoCAD) for early October, and next year he plans to issue my book SONG OF PRAISE: Homage to John Coltrane that contains all my poems and writings centered on the music of John Coltrane, so we've got a lot to talk about.
Then it's time to catch up with Maribel. She's at the Slow barbeque restaurant on Michigan Avenue just west of the deserted train station catching up with her pal Ko, leader of the band Ko & the KnockOuts and host of the weekly four-hour Ko Show for Sirius Satellite Radio. We have quite a few laughs and then Maribel drops me off at Celia's apartment for the night.
I've got the weekend off and cherish the rare opportunity to take my kids (and my grandkid) out to lunch and dinner together, enjoying some of our long-time favorite haunts like Armando's by Vernor & Clark, Union Street on Woodward Avenue (where another dear friend I've known almost since he was born, the artist and poet Michael O. Michaelowski, serves as the day manager and gives us the Detroit Police Department discount on our meal tickets), Lafayette Coney Island (where I've been dining with some of the same staff members since I came to Detroit in 1964), the historic Marcus All-Steak on McNichols east of Mt. Elliott, the Plaka Café in Greektown, and our new favorite, Don Bailey's Butcher's Inn in the Eastern Market, where the John Sinclair Burger reigns supreme.
Monday morning I'll get up and rent a car and drive Celia and myself up north to Michael Erlewine's place in Big Rapids. See you there....
-Roma, Italia
September 12, 2007
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OUT OF CONTROL
Cary Loren & BookBeat
By John Sinclair
"Our bookstore's like a screaming little kid that's out of control," BookBeat proprietor Cary Loren confesses, looking sort of sheepishly around his overstuffed shop at the outer corner of a strip mall at 10-1/2 Mile and Greenfield in Oak Park, Michigan.
He's got that right: "out of control" is the proper name for this perfect mess of a place crammed with books and visual curiosities of unseemly descriptions. True, the store presents a penetrable opening space sporting popular literary products from the present, and there's a recognizable counter with cash register and other expected signs of business activity, but past this navigable vestibule the books come stacked up thicker and higher with each step toward the rear.
BookBeat isn't some dusty relic of the days of bookshop glory, although the shop is clearly the creation of serious modern intellectuals of the humanitarian persuasion. It's a bright, colorful, warm and welcoming place for intellectual stimulation, art and politics, with a parallel reality as a comprehensive source for state-of-the-art children's books, classic literature and progressive texts.
Like all successful shops BookBeat pays close attention to the contemporary marketplace and takes great pains with its art and literary specialties and its treasured legion of readers. The store's regular reading series features the usual traveling authors and more idiosyncratic guests like Nikki Giovanni, Ira Cohen, Stanley Mouse, Faith Ringgold, Darlene Love, Anne Rice, Sonic Youth, Billy Name, Ultra Violet, Mike Kelley and Jim Shaw. They also host in-person writer events at nearby libraries and cultural centers and sponsor book clubs and book-related community events of many kinds.
These crucial outreach activities have combined with the shop's extensive and eclectic inventory to anchor BookBeat firmly in the center of the local literary and arts community. "I think you can have a good bookstore with a lot of different things," Loren says, "but you still need literature, and experimental literature, so that's been a core part, and the photography's been a core part.
"But we're missing the auto repair section, and the computer books.... There's just whole wads of books that we just said, 'Fuck It,' you know. I wanna have certain books on my shelf and I don't care if it's there a year or ten years, it's still a viable thing."
Loren's sensitivity to the needs of his clientele has paid off in the best possible way. "Our customers are very loyal," Cary says, "and they're voting with their feet when they come here instead of going to one of the chain stores. Those places are becoming more dominant and more controlling of the whole environment.
"What worries me," he says, "is that I don't think there's another generation coming up that understands the value of independent bookstores and of independent culture in general, as opposed to the chainstore reality."
He has every right to be worried, because without new seekers of wisdom and truth the independent bookstore as we know it is doomed to extinction. The converse is also true: Absent the classic independent bookstores like BookBeat, how will young readers ever understand the value of these places or be able to measure the hole left in our cultural life by their disappearance?
So much of the world represented by places like BookBeat has passed on that their continued survival is a critical issue for the future. The great thing about them is that the mental world where I live and prosper still exists here. It's an environment specifically designed for those of us who have the mental patience to investigate and discover new realms of intelligence and creativity, and you can tell at once it's not run by someone who got an MBA in management and trained at Borders or Waldenbooks.
In fact, BookBeat was created by a pair of young intellectuals from suburban Detroit as "something they could do" after college. "And, you know," Cary says, "I was not capable of doing anything else. When I was going to school I was working for other bookstores, so I knew I could do this. I wanted to go into arts, but I also knew that I needed to, like, make money. And I didn't want to stay in school and teach, and I thought, maybe I could do art and things on the side, and be supported by the store, eventually."
Cary and his wife Colleen opened BookBeat in a former pregnancy boutique called the Purple Pickle in the summer of 1982. "I moved back into my parents' house when we first opened the store," Cary recalls, "to save money. Colleen and I both lived with our parents to save money.
"But that was good to be able to put everything into the business for those two years, so we were able to expand. There was a Detroit Edison outlet next door, and three years after we opened we took that space."
Why the strip mall in Oak Park? "We knew the area, because we had grown up around here," Cary says. "We started with really nothing-my own collection of books, beat literature and stuff, and we wanted to also relate to the community too, so we were stocking Danielle Steele and Stephen King and whatever people were buying, you know, at the time.
"But our emphasis was on the arts, and children's books-those are the two areas where we wanted to start off, and we've stuck with that."
The arts make a lot of sense, and popular releases, but what about the children's books? "There's a couple reasons for carrying the children's books," Cary says. "One, a lot of really great illustrated books started to happen at that time, and we also saw that future readers are children, you know? So we need to indoctrinate children early, because those are your future readers of adult material.
"Colleen's input has been really important," Cary adds, "because she's put so much into the children's side of the store, and it's been the money-maker part of the business, certainly of late. She works closely with parents and teachers-she reads a phenomenal amount of material, I mean thousands of books every year, probably three or four thousand books a year.
"And so she has this vast warehouse of, you know, first-hand information from reading so much, and she can tell each teacher what to use for the class being offered, and she can come up with programs and books that not only affect the teacher but all the kids in each classroom. She's become a great resource for this area."
How did a couple of nice suburban kids get into all this strangeness? "I was going to Eastern Michigan University, and I got through school by working in pizza places. But I was thinking of the bookstores in Ann Arbor. Borders had just started when we got to Ann Arbor, and there was Centicore, that was one of my favorite bookstores, and there was David's Books, a large store on Liberty, it had a lot of hip poetry.
"We met Andy Warhol at the Centicore one time," Cary laughs. "I was a real Warholite, following his films and stuff, and I used to write to him when I was a high school student, like, 'If you've got any job openings or anything,' you know, and he'd send back, like, a signed postcard or something.
"But the guy I corresponded with was Jack Smith, who wrote back and said, 'Come visit me. If you're ever in New York, I'd like to meet you.' So I did, and that's when, like-that's just before Destroy All Monsters was formed, and so my esthetic really came out of my time in New York with Jack Smith. He was my mentoring experience, and so I brought that back to Ann Arbor, and that became a part of the Destroy All Monsters thing. I was doing films, photography and collages that were in his vein of... camp and strange exotica, you know?"
The lasting effect of Jack Smith's cultural tutelage persists in Loren's personal artistic output: Not just his long-standing participation in the pioneering out-rock ensemble Destroy All Monsters, but in films like Shake a Lizard Tail or Rust Belt Rump, Grow Live Monsters, Strange Frut: A History of Detroit Culture (Part One), Letters from the Dead House and Fantomash, and CDs like the seminal DAM: 1974-1976, Backyard Monster Tube & Pig, Music is Revolution and Monster Island albums like From the Michigan Floor, Dream Tiger, Swamp Gas and Killing Me Softly. This is some pretty weird stuff.
But Cary goes even farther back: "I'd also like to mention the influence of the [early '60s arts collectives] Once Group of Ann Arbor and the Detroit Artists Workshop on what our bookstore became, and also anti-art movements like Fluxus and Dadaism.
"We also try to publish and try to get a few things out. We've done books with Lisa Spindler (Perfume), a Homage to Hans Bellmer, the Destroy All Monsters package Geisha This, and the projects we did with you." [Full disclosure: Cary Loren and this writer have collaborated on several projects at BookBeat, including the books This Is Our Music and PeyoteMind and the CDs of PeyoteMind and Music Is Revolution.]
"We started our little backroom gallery soon after we opened, and we've had exhibitions by James Van Der Zee, Weegee, Billy Name, Day of the Dead Mail Art, Bruce of Los Angeles, Jim Shaw Dream Drawings, Gordon Newton, Leni Sinclair, Haitian Voudou flags and objects, Alfred Steiglitz & Cameraworks, Nina Glaser, and the group show titled Women Photograph Mythology.
"Artist and curator Jon Hendricks is currently helping me with a project with one of our gallery photographers, Jeffrey Silverthorne. We published a little book of his photographs of Goth kids, you know, shot in Detroit, with little hand-tipped-in black-and-white contact plates. I related to the Goth kids because they were, to me, like the sub-culture of now, of the '90s, at that time. So we put this little book called GOTH together and Jon sent a copy to the director, Lars Schwander in Denmark who became interested and is now publishing a catalog and traveling exhibition of Jeffrey's work.
"Some of the bizarrities we carry? A lot of experimental music, Sun Ra CDs and Sun Ra videos, Harry Bertoia LPs, miniature books, hand made artist books, original photographs, tarot cards and other odd sidelines some might consider 'out'."
Finally, looking into the future after 25 years in the same bizarre location: "I don't know. Nobody's gonna offer me ten cents for this store. Economics could squeeze us out of it. I mean, it's gotten tougher-every year it's tougher-so the economics could really squeeze us out.
"I'm know I'm not gonna get a buyout, but I gotta think of this in terms of my retirement, you know, and the thing is, I'll never get out of it! There's no leaving it. It's impossible...."
-The Dolphins
Amsterdam
October 1-9, 2006
© 2006 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.
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Finally, here's this week's podcast of the John Sinclair Radio Show from www.RadioFreeAmsterdam.com:
John Sinclair Show #141
LuveR.com Radio / Berkeley Public TV
Sunday, July 31, 2006 @ 8:30-9:45 pm [20-0724]
http://www.radiofreeamsterdam.com/audio/jsrshow141.mp3
Listening to episode #103 recorded with Frank Moore at LuveR.com Radio in Berkeley, CA I really enjoyed the dialogue but wanted to hear some music too, so I re-edited show #103 into two episodes. This is the second one, with music from the album Michigan Rocks by Bob Seger, the Stooges and Mitch Ryder. Frank Moore is an incredibly brilliant and creative man with missing legs and arms and an inability to speak words. In conversation he points out letters & short phrases on an alphabet board with a pointer strapped to his forehead, then responds as his translator puts them together to form words and ideas and questions. Check out his website at www.LuveR.com to get a better idea of the scope of his work.
Playlist #141
[01] Cosmo G Spacely Intro & Tokes
[02] Bob Seger: Heavy Music
[03] Frank Moore Translated Conversation with John Sinclair
[04] Stooges: 1969
[05] Frank Moore Translated Conversation with John Sinclair
[06] Mitch Ryder: Long Hard Road
A Joint Production
Hosted by Frank Moore for LuveR.com
& John Sinclair for Radio Free Amsterdam
Engineered & Recorded by Mikey for LuvR Radio
Edited, Assembled & Produced by John Sinclair, Amsterdam, July 12 > London, July 14, 2007
Mastered & Posted by Henk Botwinik
Executive Producer: John Sinclair
Special thanks to Jim Epstein, Joe Bryak & Richard Krech
©(P) 2006, 2007 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.
Podcast by www.RadioFreeAmsterdam.com as #141 @ August 6, 2006
