Posts Tagged ‘vesuvio’
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I should note that this joke isn’t really fair to Michael McClure who is, obviously, a respected poet in his own right. He doesn’t, though, have the iconic status of either Bob Dylan or Allen Ginsberg, and also doesn’t have the same degree of personal significance for me.
This is the last comic for now with them standing in front of that door, which is good because I was getting a bit tired of drawing it. The next comic should be posted by Wednesday, possibly tomorrow, because I’m trying to get to some upcoming things as quickly as possible and I’ve been drawing quite a bit. Still, though, check back for three updates a week, even though I know I alluded to this comic being posted last Friday, and you’re probably gathering that that didn’t happen due to the fact that it’s being posted today.
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The conversation that starts here and is gonna continue over the next couple of strips actually did happen this way, in Jack Kerouac alley, but I didn’t really plan it to happen there all that much. We were shopping at City Lights, and it seemed like the right time to talk about some things. It was kinda bubbling up in me for most of that afternoon. As far as presenting in the comics the conversation where it actually happened, it worked for me because it fit in with running themes that have been going through all of these strips for a while now. I really like drawing in Vesuvio, and I had already taken the boy from Santa Cruz there with me before so he could drink absinthe and listen to be ramble on about Arthur Rimbaud. One of the things I did like about us dating, though, was that we could spend hours in bookstores, talking about Caravaggio or flipping through art monographs, whatever, and that’s valuable. I look back nostalgically sometimes on one relationship that was actually a pretty horrible one, because he liked comics a lot and we could go to shops and browse forever and show things to each other.
There are a few comics and drawings throughout the archives on here that were drawn in Vesuvio, and probably more than a few mentions of Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan. There are also little things in the buildings I chose to draw in this strip that are meant to connect with things in comics that I’m planning but haven’t done or posted yet, so this strips to me is meant to kind of tie a lot of things together. The main little joke that might kind of need an explanation is that between the second and third panels, the characters actually go through a bit of a time warp, because in the third panel they’re standing in front of the door as it looks in that picture of Ginsberg and Dylan from the sixties, whereas today I believe that area of the alley is actually covered with a big mural. I decided I’d rather draw the door as it was in the picture rather than as it exists today, and that somehow sorta makes sense to me. The first two panels are much more based on how the area looks these days. I’ve started to get more into firmly setting my comics in their environment, whereas before the backgrounds used to be maybe more impressionistic sometimes. I really like taking pictures of places to use in the comics, and my comic that’s gonna be in an upcoming anthology about the San Francisco Mission District was a really fun experiment for me with that.
Next strip will be posted on Thursday or Friday, since it’s gonna be a fairly large one, and I doubt I’ll be able to finish drawing it by Wednesday. Otherwise, I’m mostly been sticking to a Monday/ Wednesday/ Friday schedule for posts, so check back.
So, as the caption indicates, I did this sketch for a friend named Marshall. One of the first places I discovered up here was Vesuvio Cafe across from City Lights Bookstore, and everything about it made me feel compelled to draw, write, be there. City Lights is the bookstore that originally published Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, and it’s still an amazing bookstore today. Across the street, amongst strip clubs and restaurants and eclectic housing, is a business that designates itself The Beat Museum. You can buy T-Shirts with a picture of Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan standing together in a doorway that’s visible from the tables on the second floor of Vesuvio, near where I drew that picture of myself. Vesuvio has pictures of Kerouac, Neal Cassady, all those guys, hanging on the walls, and most of them allegedly hung out and wrote there. I think it recently celebrated its 60th anniversary.
Downstairs, they sell absinthe, melt sugar and pour it through the slotted spoon and the whole bit. The absinthe makes me think of Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, what they would have been doing if they had been there, what they would think of me and that hat and sweater I’m rockin’ in that picture. The picture of Dylan and Ginsberg makes me wonder what Rimbaud would have made of Dylan, an admitted fan of his. What would Woody Guthrie have made of Paul Verlaine? I like to imagine that, in this cafe of my imagined poetical pantheon, Rimbaud would have found his way onto Neal Cassady’s lap. If we’re all there, he would be welcome on my lap too, of course.
The first time I came to Vesuvio, I immediately felt a rush of heady electricity, imagining all these connections and permutations rushing backwards through time and forward to Broadway and Columbus today, and hopefully forward further into the future, if those who can do there best to make sure it does. My first night that I wandered in there, I hadn’t brought a sketchbook with me, but I knew that I had to draw something, or write something, and I knew that if I had a pen in my hand something would come out of it, so I ran to the nearest store I could find, which happened to be a Walgreen’s, they’re everywhere up here, and I ran (literally) back, to the alley where that Kerouac quote at the top of the drawing is written in the ground, near the Ginsberg-Dylan door, and I wrote it down in the notebook. Of course, after spending a little more time in Vesuvio I noticed that on a lot of nights it’s overtaken by annoying twenty-something guys talking loudly to impress the vague, confused, and too-buzzed twenty-something girls they’re trying to fuck, will fuck if they can just get them a little more buzzed so they aren’t sure any longer whether loud, assertive men remind them of their inclination to rebel against their fathers or their inclination to seek their approval. Those people are a lot more interested in the titty bars than in the psychic residual permutations of William Burroughs. They’re not everybody, though, and the bar is still one of many places that make me profoundly grateful to live in this city where so many things have happened, and walk streets that Hitchcock and R. Crumb have walked.
A while after doing this sketch and sending it to Marshall, I was in Cinch, a bar on Polk where I seem to enjoy getting blindingly drunk a lot of Fridays, and I was stopped by an older man who pointed at my sketchbook. I try to carry my sketchbook with me as much as possible when I go out, I never know when I’m gonna need it, and it also serves to give guys who might want to talk to me an easy excuse. I couldn’t understand what the older man was saying, so I leaned in close to hear him. He was wearing a scarf and a hat, and so was I.
“Do you do poetry?” He asked me.
“Some,” I say. “I write. Comics, different things.”
“Do you like poetry?”
“Sure,” I say. He asks my favorite poets. I don’t really know that much about poetry, so I name the obvious ones, most of whom I mentioned above. When I get to Ginsberg, he smiles and taps my arm. “I knew Ginsberg, ” he says.
“Seriously?” I don’t know if I believe him or not, but I’m interested.
“Can I see your sketchbook?”
I open it for him. I get to the sketch above, and the man becomes visibly excited.
“Kerouac!” he says, pointing to the quote. “People your age, they seem to know Kerouac now.”
“Did you know him?”
“I talked to him once,” the man says, “but I don’t really remember about what.”
The fact that he’s admitting that he doesn’t remember rather than making something up makes me more inclined to believe him.
I ask him to tell me more about Ginsberg, and he starts to tell me about a reading he went to where Ginsberg and another poet took apart a piano with a hatchet. He tells me about a love-in in Golden Gate Park, with people openly selling acid and other Beat poets reading. He tells me about being in a cafe one afternoon, maybe 10 blocks from where we were, and Ginsberg coming in and asking them to listen to him read something he was working on. It was an early draft of Howl.
“The things that were happening in this city then, the ’50′s and ’60′s, people you’re age feel like they’re relevant now?”
I tell him that the more I explore art, poetry, music, comics, prose, all of it, a lot of my interests seem to go back and revolve around those times. He nods and says that he feels like it’s coming back, that whatever cycles we travel in are coming back around to those times. I feel like we’re saying the same things from two sides, because it’s something that I’ve been grappling with recently. Politically, culturally, artistically, there’s a sense that something needs to be done and a relevance to idealism that seems to be an echo of other historical crash-and-burns. Maybe it’s Obama.
“What are you here for?” the man asks me.
I was in the bar to get laid, but I took it he meant San Francisco in general rather than the Cinch specifically. “I don’t know,” I say. “I just felt like it was where I was supposed to be.”
“You know,” he said. He put his hand on my chest and smiled at me. “You just need to find out.”
I stared at him, a little drunk and confused, not quite knowing what to say to that. What do you say to that? But somehow, it seemed completely real. In a movie, you probably would have shifted in your seat or maybe rolled your eyes. But I thought I knew when he was referring to, even if, like always, I can’t quite be sure I wasn’t confusing knowing with hoping.
Shit like that never happened in Riverside.
