Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

“Where pavement ends and the west begins”—a sign on the outskirts of Gerlach, Nevada (population 200). Actually pavement runs another fifteen miles to the edge of nothing, the far side of everything, but you get the idea. Gerlach is the only fragment of a town for about a hundred miles in any direction, unless you count the gypsum operation seven miles south, a dust-encrusted little outpost named “Empire,” in perfect satire of sun-demented hubris. Gerlach sits at the southern tip of the Black Rock Desert, rimmed by abrupt mountains—Granite Range on the west, a five thousand foot high promontory dotted by scrawny juniper, and Selenite Range on the east, darker and starker—a radiant, waterless fjord that opens to a waterless sea.

Gerlach is best known as the town closest to Burning Man—that cosmic art storm splatter on the open playa canvas—40,000 assorted mystic freaks camped on the blinding plane every Labor Day weekend, altering parched reality. Never been to Burning Man? It costs about $400 and a Scooby Doo van to get in; out beyond the solar groove. In Gerlach you won’t find much—a post office, a school, a few bars and slot machines. Bruno’s Country Club is the social hub, and its owner, Bruno Selmi, owns most of the town. Bruno is a man of short stature, slightly hunched, into his eighties, with a full head of white hair, neatly buzzed. He came from the old country (Tuscany) in 1946, found a job at the gypsum plant, and took a liking to northwestern Nevada’s majestic moonscape desolation. So he began his business empire by leasing a bar in Gerlach. Sixty years later he owns a gas station by the tracks, a bar, a café and two ranches, plus other smaller concerns. He is shrewd and tough as nails, sometimes curses a lot, and tends bar every night. The annual Burning Man meltdown is a boon for business, though in general Bruno regards the event as “the biggest bunch of dopeheads he’s ever seen.”

A couple miles north of Gerlach you’ll find a street sign on the left, “Guru Rd,” and a rocky path into the sage and talus slopes. Take the road. Turns out Gerlach was once home to a guru, the late Dooby Williams, who had a vision, or several. So he finagled some land from the Bureau of Land Management and scraped out a crude road alongside the paved one, whereupon he built his vision. Or several. On Guru Road you grind through the hardscrabble high desert and ponder peculiar exhibits sculpted with stacked rock. The trail is lined with hundreds of engraved and painted flat stones, the medium of choice, each inscribed with some sort of tribute, or idiosyncratic bit of wisdom, or Zen goof.

No one takes Dooby’s visions too seriously, yet you find yourself stuck on one or two. At high noon the “Sagebrush Net Work” is good for a little shade—an octagonal hovel stood up on weathered, gray poles, overlaid with saggy thatching and wrapped by an odd sort of net (work). On each side except the door, the net is cut open in a rectangle and framed by the plastic face of an old TV set—Sylvania, Zenith and such. A TV antenna juts from the roof, one of those 1960s aluminum trees, and a flat rock inside reads: “To change channel, turn head.” Dial the side canyons. Or waterless sea. Poetry on each channel, and a decrepit wicker chair in the middle. You savor the rake of raw breeze, see things in the horizon you never noticed, exaggerated by old television frames. You bought some time.

another good read, nazzerino. are you working on volume 2? you should, you know... i know you should.

thx for the taste. went down well.

“To change channel, turn head." that's killer!!

yeah, I think it was my favorite dooby-ism...

as for that bit about the "city as a porn flick," it was inspired(?) by HST's fear & loathing..-- just re-read that madness... brilliant.

This write is... to be continued...

yeah cec-- written a lot this winter. I was going over the list...

"get away," "get back," "motel checklist," "mirage," "badlands,"
"god wars," "big dog woofer dub," "dooby's road,"
"ore scrounging," "explosions," "semi-dada," "the jesus chapter,"
"the god particle," "the beige hole"

hmm, fourteen... not bad.

you've been busy, mnaz... keeping those creative juices flowing.. way to go. get it out while it's there... the block will arrive when you least expect it.

i've been organizing my writes, streams and poems both, and getting quite a surprise as to how many of those have built up over the years (yeah, years... including the litkicks days).

sounds like a good project, cec. pull them together, organize and edit a bit, then put out a book or two. (everyone's doing it-- haha).

I added to & rewrote the end. I'll just post this thing as I go...

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You can’t imagine the city out there—the reason folks are out there to begin with, where the city morphs internally into a sort of depraved filth left behind; a grainy porn flick full of hustlers and addicts, rapists and serial vampires, even liberals! The city and its bottomless well of evils and excess, kingdom of utter decay. The worst foul pollution imaginable. Deep in the desert, on the go-everywhere light, the oversexed Whore of Babylon is in your rear-view, creeping closer; a quiet neurosis out of proportion, entirely justified. Ask the locals. As Hunter S. Thompson explained—“suddenly they found themselves next to a white Cadillac convertible all covered with vomit and a 300-pound Samoan in a yellow fishnet T-shirt yelling at them: ‘Hey there! You folks want to buy some heroin? This is scag folks, pure scag!’ He whacked on the side of the car.” Unthinkable to revisit the city’s crowded filth from the brilliant empty, though it’s odd how the city’s tainted tentacles penetrate the brilliant empty with relative ease. Teevee News for profit. Cable, satellite; techno closes in. Destruction makes more sense all the time.

In a shabby hut on the fringe, the intoxication of raw light rimmed by old TV faces, you found Walter Cronkite’s face on a rock—picked it up and there he was. You’re up against Cronkite now, but you get the last word. And make it heavy; don’t fuck around—some hopeless abstraction. Like religion. . . “Yes, speak your mind, ye faithful! But lay off the End of Days. No private accounts with the Almighty projected on the collective; God is an individual concern. Linear beliefs meet nonlinearity of cosmos”. . . Okay, not bad. Preaching to the saltbush. . .“And religion is more than sorting scripture and deities; more like instilled compulsion. Like war. War is religion. Canonized millennia ago. Useful to the tip of the pyramid; generally useless to the base, though honorable and sacred to the peasant tribes”. . . Jeezus man, lucky no one can hear you. Enough. The guru gets the last word. Plenty of engraved ravings on the trail, but first a little bourbon. Watch the limitless desert beamed through an old Zenith set.

You could have a little fun with old teevees framing the Dipper and other celestial sheen at 1 AM, passed out on the wicker chair, adrift on the glow of an all-night Dragnet marathon . . . “Now you listen and listen good, mister. Marijuana is the flame, heroin is the fuse, LSD is the bomb. . . But I help give them direction! . . . Mister you couldn’t give directions to the men’s room.” Narrative glitch here. Doubtful if Detective Friday could give rest room directions from a strange interrogation cell either, but he had a point. Everything was the domino theory then—give an inch and they grab a mile. Let ‘em have Vietnam, and you’re slaving in some rice paddy, speaking Chinese. Let the tokers have a little grass, and they become acid-crazed dogs with murder and rape in their twisted eyes. Domino theory. Why not? Our own matrix of greed and fear aimed at us, in absurd paranoia. On the other hand, we do have that nasty track record, so yes, lock up the potheads; don’t take any chances with the vicious brutes.

Satiric dissent even in your sleep! In your chair with the TV still on, under the ghostly, galactic glow. Don’t push it. You’re bound to run into a beast known as The Activist; endangered and fearsome, wielder of savage psychological weaponry—“So what are you doing about it?” Doing? What can mass do about gravity? Or pebbles, about a wall? The Activist, with pebbles of mass compunction; rabid badger of delusion and guilt in a sweater. “You’re a part of the problem.” Likely. And Gandhi probably forgot to recycle his garbage. You’re part of the problem, snoring under the glow; Milky Way’s angelic opalescence, the Dipper and Cassiopeia’s vainglorious W piercing deep black, the closest stars tactile and bursting, and faint flicker in the margins. Inconceivable depth. . . Lost track of the afternoon somewhere. Brain was strangely busy, and then the bourbon. And Cronkite’s face turned up on some rock. And that’s the way it is. Arid pure light; the soothing monster, into bonfires of the night sky. Dry ridges and dry mouth. Pace still a little too fast.

I´ve being reading & enjoying the takes-tokes? . I loved also today landscape´s existential-forms..! gracias for sharing them with us, mnaz!!