7 posts tagged “bard”
This morning I am, as usual on a Sunday, at Quacks sitting at my regular table and contemplating the graffiti on the wall next to me: “Omens will eat you alive.” It appeared months ago, barely a week after the new paint job dried, and I’ve been wondering what it means ever since. Or more to the point, what it meant to the person who wrote it.
The joy of graffiti often comes from its crypticness, though from my experience that’s usually more of a pleasure for the scrawler than the observer. People love in-jokes as long as they’re in on them and there’s little in this world that’s more an in-joke than graffiti only you and maybe one or two other people will understand. At least that was my experience back when I fearlessly wielded a Marks-A-Lot.
Defacing any flat surface of common property seemed to come naturally in my school years – it was, as my brother later said of bumper stickers, “just another way to carry on the dialogue.” Desks in every classroom and stall-dividers in every boys’ bathroom at Westtown were covered with graffiti and even as a day student I contributed my share – Ramones lyrics, derogatory comments about the Student Body President (the one my senior year weaseled his way into office on a promise of beer in the water fountains), even just the names of the King Crimson members on the first album. When I first started using the Upper School bathrooms in 7th grade I spent any number of hours pondering other messages left: who felt compelled to share with the school that “Kintner is burned out on glue”? Why did someone draw a mangy likeness of a mutt closely modeled on Thurber’s Muggs and title it “Potto’s Dog” (Potto being the name assigned to an Assistant Boy’s Dean who reputedly patrolled the grounds at night with a flashlight, shaking bushes to flush out pot-smokers) when Potto, far as anyone knew, didn’t even have a dog? And so on.
Things got a lot more out of hand in college, as they will when you gather a bunch of young people who think they’re just so damn clever. At first I was content to confine my wall-scrawlings to my own dorm; one winter night left to my own devices in Seymour after practically everyone had already gone home for winter break and feeling particularly nihilistic, I wrote “Is it true as you say that we’re on the eve of destruction?” in peanut butter in the stairwell. It wasn’t until I fell in with Ivan junior year that I learned the folly of this; Ivan worked part-time for Buildings & Grounds and told me, “They all know it’s you, man, and they’re just waiting for you to fuck up.” Ivan taught me how to graffiti the smart way like he did, which was every-damn-where else on campus. Also how to make it cryptic enough so it wasn’t easily traceable to its source; Ivan hated hippies, but no one who didn’t know him well would ever guess that “No tofu for you!”, which appeared ubiquitously in El Marko throughout senior year, was his handiwork.
And when I graduated and moved to Boston I viewed the city at first as an extension of Bard. I took a house in Somerville with Lori, who had grown up in Tivoli and was getting away for the first time; Lori bought a magnum marker, the biggest the art supply stores sold, and proceeded to use it everywhere she went in Somerville – even (or especially) on sidewalks. She was freaked out by Harry Hood, at the time a pint-size animated spokesman for the area’s predominant line of dairy products, so she tried to exorcise him by prefacing nonsensical statements with “Harry sez:” or often just “Harry gives Hood head!” I preferred my favored Bard icon, a stick figure with wedge-shaped head. For us this was only perfectly reasonable behavior and I had no idea how annoying it probably was to the working-class folks around us.
(Actually, I kind of did. We both hated Somerville. If we’d stayed in that neighborhood longer than three months and kept that shit up one or both of us would have likely made the acquaintance of the local PD and not in a good way.)
Leaving Boston though broke me of the habit, pretty much for good. Greenpeace shipped me to Greenwich, then Philadelphia, and finally San Francisco and in the course of my travels I gradually absorbed the idea that in most of the real world – specifically, the world that I wanted to learn to be a part of - there’s just no place where graffiti doesn’t stick out like the proverbial sore thumb. And because I never did it as performance art or as a revolutionary act or really for any reason but getting (and hopefully provoking) a cheap laugh, it didn’t seem worth the risk.
Or maybe joining up with Greenpeace channeled my need to act out into a more socially acceptable (and certainly better-protected) venue. If you want to call 80s-era GP “socially acceptable.” I suppose I could have done much worse and gone for Earth First instead.
Whatever. No here I am 25 years later, back in a college town where the graffiti is good, great sometimes, but mostly still cryptic. I don't feel any particular desire to join in; cheap laughs are just as easy to come by these days from other sources. I'll probably always feel the urge to interpret, though, as I'm proving this morning at Quacks.
My friend Myra from Bard has been rummaging around for stuff to post to Facebook and this morning came up with this little gem:
That’s me and Myra in my room in Seymour sophomore year. Myra thought it was from Barrytown several years later but I know it’s 79 f’shizzle because that hookah belonged to my across-the-hall neighbor Holly Ricker (nee Berezow) and I never saw it again after she moved to Blithewood or wherever she went mid-year.
For the record, I don’t remember conclusively but I’m pretty sure Myra is smoking tobacco only in this picture. Because that’s all we ever used that hookah for, right? Uh-huh.
The friendship between Myra and me is a textbook example of how things evolve when you have four years together in a fishbowl like Bard. Freshman year I only knew her by sight, this brassy redhead with total Flushing style who lived in Gahagan (which in 78 might as well have been off-campus). Sophomore year Myra ran with my good friend Hannah Bennett who lived upstairs in Seymour (and, I'm pretty sure, took this picture) and Lucy Park who lived in Hopson (technically the same building, connected by a creepy tunnel underneath that also housed our never-clean-enough shower facilities) and she was around a lot but, this picture evidently to the contrary, I don’t remember us getting along all that well. Junior year she had a house off-campus with Suzanne Schwartzberg, who become one of my best friends that year, and Myra and I came to a sort of truce . By the end of the year were even somewhat chummy.
Chummy enough for Myra that spring to introduce me and my friend Stu to her real-estate agent father, who needed someone to look after a property on Long Island for the summer. The rest, as they say, is history. Or at least personal history. That year’s summer, 1981, was a fantastic one and Myra was a big part of it – she dropped by that old ramshackle house frequently, to use our tanning deck or just hang with Stu and me and Mara (Stu’s girlfriend, whose live-in status was definitely not part of the original arrangement with Myra’s father), and we all became buds of the highest order.
And a year later when I sublet Nancy’s apartment on the third floor of that old house in Barrytown, Myra was my first choice for roommate. The summer of 82 was in its way just as good as the one preceding it, in part because Myra was perhaps the best roommate I ever had. I hope she finds some real photos from that period eventually - we had a lot of fun.
Which all goes to show, you really don’t know who your friends are going to be in a few years. So offer everyone a light when you’re given the chance. It may pay off later.
(Suzanne, if you’re not keeping track, later married my best friend Michael. They’re the ones who live in Warwick. I thought I'd heard Myra's father died but she says he's alive and well and I'm glad because I really liked the guy, not least because he raised such a great daughter. Lucy Park is in her hometown of Portland OR or so her Facebook page says; Holly Hookah-girl is on FB too. But Hannah Bennett, Stu and Mara remain unaccounted-for.)
Because the essential nature of the internet is that one things leads to another ad infinitum, signing up for Facebook was only the very barest beginning. Of course it was. It led me to was the aforementioned Suzy the guitarist, who in turn pointed me to a site dedicated to bygone Bard bands, and next thing I knew I was digging up the piece I wrote on the subject 27 long years ago and measuring it for redrafting because lord knows it would be a huge shame if the Lost Cause and the Samoanz got no digi-ink.
So that’s largely what I’ve been doing the last month: dicking around on Facebook and hacking apart hoary old scribings. Facebook also puts me in touch with most of the ex-Samoanz so I can reasonably hope their rewrite will be thoroughly fact-checked. The Lost Cause probably not so much as the sole Cause member I find doesn’t seem too interested in responding to my various invites. This is a shame because we used to be good friends but since there’s a number of former BFFs I’ve stopped speaking to over the years I’m just letting it drop.
On the upside I’ve now got something back I thought I’d lost forever, namely photographic proof that I did actually once play drums in a band. I don’t know how Suzy managed over the years to hang on to these shots but god bless her. I barely remember that gig myself and now I won’t have to. I can’t put into words how soothing it is to have this small and rarely-mentioned part of my past in my grasp again.
Presented here then for your enjoyment are The Dead Rabbits in front of Stone Row, May 1982: our last show, or close to it. The wind kept kicking up that day and blowing over my cymbal stands, which alarmed me no end because it wasn't my drum set - as usual it was Stu Wood's, the only person left on campus who'd let me use his gear because I battered so hard. He said after letting legendary basher Marc Bell borrow it at a Voidoids gig some years before he didn't see how I could do more damage to it.
(Our band went by several names but Dead Rabbits was the last so it's the one stuck in my mind all these years. Imagine my dismay to find a NY street gang had already claimed it 130 years before.)
In a fit of “I’ll show them who’s an antique”-ness Monday I signed up for Facebook and now am, predictably, already feeling overwhelmed. Shee-sus. If I wanted to find Carl who I used to terrorize on the 7th grade playground, he’s there. The young woman to whom I lost my virginity? She’s there, photos of her kid and all. Charlie, my buddy from the Westtown swim team? There. Suzy who played rhythm guitar in my last band at Bard? Yep. Cindi who I had such an immense crush on junior year? All righty then, let’s not forget her. I heard Cindi liked blackberry brandy so I stashed a pint in my room just in case she hypothetically ever dropped by. Even then I’d never have touched the stuff myself, ick, but seeing her picture on FB reminds me exactly why I kept that bottle long past any crush’s reasonable expiration date. Girlfriend looks hot for her 40s.
And so on.
Now, I already know the internet has its wonders. Over the years it’s helped me keep track of, among others, my old Bard pals Nayland Blake and George Hunka who both have their own established web presence and that in itself seemed wondrous enough. But shit – now by pushing a few buttons on the browser I can legitimately call them friends again. So much for a low-stim, mellow beginning to 2009.
Every time I talk at length to Michael he wonders whatever happened to a certain old girlfriend who came about three or four before Suzanne. Well, he ought to join Facebook too because she’s sure as hell there. No doubt he will some day. The fact that I finally succumbed pretty accurately predicts the fate of even a computer-phobe like him.
The Bard campus has changed a lot in the intervening 26 years, meaning that if it were a commercial property, developers would be creaming in their jeans at all the infill that's gone up. Yeah, I know the college wants to accommodate a larger student body (during my time there it barely topped 1000) and its staggering tuition fees but even so, damned if they don't know how to ruin a beautiful campus by building promiscuously on it. Fully half the present structures weren't there when I graduated. Some of the new ones are kind of impressive, I admit, but fuck 'em.
And yet for all the fuck 'ems there's the like of magnificent, unchanging Blithewood, the old mansion at the south end of campus formerly a girl's dorm but now housing the Jerome Levy Economics Institute. Many a great romp was had on the lawn and gardens behind, including my first acid trip. I somehow managed to overlook Blithewood during my day's puttering around campus so the next day I stopped by on the way up to New Hampshire to snap a few of the big ol' white palace. Crews were busy setting up tents and whatnot for graduation but no one stopped to bother one guy with a camera. Benefits of an open campus and all.
I mean really. Can you imagine once using this place as a dorm? No wonder the bequest to Bard included the stipulation that boys never be allowed to live here.
Of course, for a Bard grad there's little reason to visit the mid-Hudson area but to poke around the ol' campus. Didn't do much of that last year because I was ducking the dreaded 25th reunion, but this year was safe and the campus was fairly quiet, making its final preparations for graduation a few days later.
One of the ways you can tell you’ve truly started to age is when you get your high school or college alumni magazine and the first part you turn to is the obituaries. One of the ways you can tell that you actually have aged is when your former schoolmates are in it.
OK, it’s not actually the first part I turn to. Class notes is, of course, because at this point the living still far outnumber the dead even if they write in less and less over the years. And because I hope to sometimes see news of my old Bard girlfriend Anastasia, though since she sometimes uses aliases –Annalee Van Kleek was favored 16 years ago – it’s hard to be sure who is her anymore.
The Bard magazine has coughed up a couple of obit-section shockers lately. Two days ago I opened the most recent to find that Jann Levinson (class of '83) had died. Lung cancer. She always did like to smoke a lot. We were neighbors in the same tiny dorm for two years but I never knew she spelled her name with two Ns. Or maybe she didn’t then. It was a long time ago.
I really liked Jan, even if I often didn’t know what to make of her. I think she was in her mid-20s then, which to me made her unfathomably older than everyone around us. Sometimes she needed to cry and came over to my room. Sometimes I needed to and went to hers. She lent me her car if I didn’t ask too often. She was a good friend, though I rarely had the sense to realize it at the time.
(I’ll never know how she lived for two years in that 8x10 room with her electric piano taking up half of the floor. If she’d played it all the time we might not have been so good as neighbors.)
The obit for Pat Covert (also ’83) appeared last summer and, well, it kind of rocked me. The magazine didn’t list the cause of death (it usually doesn’t, which at first I found annoying but now just thoughtful) and the internet isn’t much help so I’m still wondering. My first thought was that it might have been suicide or some less obvious form of self-destruction. I hope I'm wrong.
Pat had a lot in common with Jan, though on the rare occasion when they shared a room you wouldn't have thought so and both would have been appalled, nay outright offended, if you pointed it out. Both were first and foremost musicians, committed for life to their distinct forms of performance (balladry for Jan, rough spoken-word for Pat). Both would never be cool enough for Bard, which in the end proves laudable on its own. And both were essentially kind, wise after their own fashion, and possessed an innate decency that set them apart.
You just didn't notice it so quickly with Pat. Pat in those days was, to put it kindly, a piece of work, a troubled and abrasive and sometimes scary guy. Michael, Nancy and I chose him as bassist for our band because he, like myself and Nancy, was perceived as too untalented for anyone else to want to play with. The band broke up after Pat had a violent fit of temper in rehearsal one day and kicked my drum set over while I was still behind it. Kicked it at me, in fact, because I was practicing fills while he was trying to tune.
During the 8 months we played together – including one memorable very long night when all four of us dosed and stumbled from one end of campus to the other and back – I got past Pat’s snarly Fuck You persona and saw what a sweet guy he could be. It’s true, he was the first (and fortunately to date only) person I ever heard say “Blow me till I bleed.” Also true he was the kind to walk up to me, point to Anastasia on my arm, and without benefit of introduction to her say “I don’t see how a scum like you gets a pretty girl like that.” He did stuff like that so routinely I dubbed him Covertus Erectus. Even so, the hurt and confusion behind his behavior, as well as the backward genius that grasped unpopularity as its own form of popularity and cultivated it as his role, was readily visible to anyone who cared to look. Even me at the unripe age of 21.
What the hell. We were all so young then (even Jan). From what I've dug up on Pat it seems like he later settled into a community of like minds in his native Schenectady, where he was known as Wulf, and found the appreciation for his art and his commitment to it denied him when I knew him. Jan went to Jackson Hole and finally Point Reyes and made a name in her own circles. Both of them, like so many others we went to school with, Became Something after we left. I'm glad to have known them then, and today regret that I’ll never get the chance to again.
My Groups
-
Austin Updated: Oct 7, 2009
-
PhotoCritiques Updated: Sep 30, 2009
-
Austin Writing From the Heart (host) Updated: Feb 19, 2009
Neighborhood
Explore friends, family, friends & family, or entire neighborhood.
