The Moving Cartoon #1

T H E

M O V I N G

C A R T O O N

# 1

Communiqué 67.03 Have the robot fetch my zeppelin.

Fall 1967 We talked a lot about Flash Gordon. Ming the Magnificent had so completely forced Dr. Zarkov to develop all of those rays and magnetic force fields and things. He was like a prisoner of the empire. If he could get set free, he would have put all those great ideas and so much more to work for the good of eh, where was it….that Flash came from…uh…you know…here.

In 67’ we had been stenciling banana splits all over Houston, all summer long.

Signing them FRB Rapho. FRB was just one guy, but we were, like, more than one. The City government began to react and declared that Art Vandalism must cease and desist. We released a press statement that the stencils were an art project directed by Dr. Zarkov. They demanded that Dr. Zarkov was a criminal graffiti artist, a danger and should just surrender to authority.

Mayo and I were in the living room of Casa Rapho in the Montrose one afternoon. You know, I think we were listening to the Holy Model Rounders and FRB just jumps up and screams at the front porch window, “You bastards, give it up… Who are you?” He took off to the back of the house and came back with this handheld video camera.

In those days a video camera, in its most mobile form, was a two-man operation.

One carried the camera and the other carried the recorder and battery. FRB yelled, “Here take the bag and come with me”. We ran across the 1920’s gentile front porch into the humid Houston yard and he slammed to a stop. There was a car parked in front of the house next door. Two guys were in the front seat. In their early thirties, suits, sun glasses. FRB screams “Come on, you think I can’t see you? You see me.” He inserted himself into their reality like a picture, a moving picture, but really live theater.

He jerked my wires and we went toward the car. When we got there FRB flopped himself down across the hood of the car and started taping through the front windshield. “Just so I can recognize you guys… if we meet again…or not”

These two guys looked at each other, then back at us, then back at each other.

The one behind the wheel started the car and honked the horn…once. FRB slowly pulled the shot back. Edging himself off the hood, he slowly panned the camera back and forth, giving each guy some solid camera time. Together we slowly backed up and followed the car as it pulled into the street, getting the plates and seeing it turn at next corner.

FRB said “and…cut”. We went back inside and there and then decided that Dr. Zarkov would have eventually gotten into guerilla video as a creative outlet, even while being held prisoner by Ming. What a powerful thing the image and the sound were. We could follow through with change made by art. By inserting our individual energies into a vessel entity, we could step lightly outside of the individual reality. An artful entity, an art warrior. Dr. Zarkov beamed in.

As Dr. Zarkov we placed Zapata’s Last Bullet in a park that banned hippies. We shattered, with ball peen hammers, a 12 foot long Plexiglas carrot we had secretly placed on the lawn of the brand new Contemporary Art Museum, just before the opening reception. We were a weapon of mass ART.

Communiqué 68.02 Hazel’s Boy Mayo Fall 1967 Cecil Pickett was scouring state theater competitions to find promising young actors to attend his final senior year theater classes at Bellaire High School. My junior year was full of acting awards and reviews so I was on the list. My parents had been having a rough patch and they agreed that a move back to Houston might do us all some good. So, in 1967 I started as a senior at Bellaire High School.

Cecil was going to become the Dean of Theater Arts at the University of Houston the following year. He was nurturing his first freshman class. We were a pretty eclectic bunch. Some of us, Randy and Dennis Quaid and Cecil’s daughter Cindy went on to some commercial success. But we were, every one of us, artists at heart. And Cecil pulled us all in with small scholarships.

I was cruising with theater, so photography was my thing that year, I had been shooting for my school paper the year before and my Dad was letting me use his Nikon. My English teacher, Hazel Thompson, had been encouraging my poetry when she found out that I was also a songwriter, actor, musician and photographer with my own camera. Hazel, ever the practical teacher, signed me up on the spot as shutter man for the 68’ yearbook. That’s when I started going over to Hazel’s house.

Hazel’s son Mayo had graduated the year before and was still at home. Once a week after school the yearbook staff would meet at Hazel’s to look over what

page layouts and photo work we had finished. Mayo had a band that rehearsed in the garage all the time. The Red Crayola is not explainable. The band was a three-piece ensemble that refused to conform to any concept of music theory.

Songs like Hurricane Fighter Plane and War Sucks altered the way I heard music and what I saw as art.

As the Crayola’s fans grew in number we formed a group art piece that was known as the Familiar Ugly. We went to any concert the guys played and assisted in confusing the true audience, if there was any. Like the time FRB Rapho brought a case of tiny Chinese cameras, loaded with film. He tossed them out to the audience and asked them to snap shots of each other during the concert and return them to him for processing. Great Art in the making. We were Tejano Bohemians out of control.

For one performance, Mayo had somehow gotten a gig in the parking lot of a new suburban shopping strip. The stage was a flatbed truck trailer. By this time the Familiar Ugly was over 50 strong and we all showed up for the gig. Oddly enough, the head producer of International Artist Records, Lelan Rogers, was also in the audience. He saw this strange group of hippies mixed in with housewives and clerks on a break. They were dancing and singing like they knew every riff and word the band produced. Besides, he was producing the first psychedelic band in history, the 13th Floor Elevators. What he was seeing and hearing had to be psychedelic or at least a freak out. He signed them on the spot.

Mayo knew my music from Hazel’s house. I would play for the Ugly and jam a little with them sometimes in the garage. Mayo had talked about and played around with a song cycle I was trying to finish called Mother’s Milk. Somehow magic Mayo convinced Lelan Rogers and Noble Ginther to sign me to IA for three albums. My Dad signed the contract just before my 17th birthday.

Communiqué 69.01 The Family Hand & Good Relations Winter 1968 I first met the Merry Band of All Possibilities in Houston back in 1968. Denny Yarnell had gone all Zen and left for Tassajara that spring. I had a little record shop in Head Dress, Suzanne Yarnell’s all purpose psychedelic market in the basement of Jubilee Hall. Suzanne was a 23 year old veteran of the Manhattan Beat scene, about to become a hippie. As soon as Denny hit the trail, she tucked my young ass under her crazy quilt. We were all a part of a loosely communal urban family. We called ourselves the Family Hand.

Jubilee Hall was in an old church at the corner of Bagby and McGowen, in a decaying area of once stately two story homes and small corner stores.

Families had fled, but artists, beatniks and merchant marines were making a new neighborhood that was soon to become a hippie ghetto.

The music was the message at Jubilee Hall. Shiva’s Headband, the Children, Johnny Winter, Lost and Found, Lightnin’ Hopkins, the 13th Floor Elevators, oh so much more. We were dancing to a new sound, breaking away from old forms and honoring them at the same time.

A troop from Austin that would later become Esther’s Follies had made a success of an original musical, “The Earl of Rustin”, at Jubilee Hall. We had a hippie spectacle reputation and so, late that summer, this theater group from San Francisco arranged to perform their production of “Don Juan” at the Hall.

It was s strange meet. These groups of Texas Bohemians, psychedelic travelers, social dreamers and refugees from the summer of love all converged in Houston that summer.

The Theater of All Possibilities had gotten together in Berkley in 1967. Kathlyn Gray was a young theater student who had met John Allen, an older guy, a graduate of the Colorado School of Mines, at a bus stop near the campus.

Johnny Dauphin told Honey he was a dramaturge and wove tales of the Golden Temple in Vietnam and the Living Theater in Manhattan. Together, with Johnny’s wife Flash and as eclectic a group of fellow travelers as ever existed, they set off, like Orpheus, on a quest to find all possibilities. They got on the bus.

Jubilee Hall was in an old wooden church building surrounded by the remains of one of Houston’s earliest middle class neighborhoods. Susan and I lived in a crumbling two story on the corner across from the Hall. She and Denny had opened one of the first “head stores” in Space City, Headdress. They sold clothes, Indian bedspreads, incense and “novelties”. The shop was in the basement of Jubilee Hall and I took a space at the back and opened Good Relations, a little record store. After Denny left for Marin County, Susan and I would get up at ten or eleven, have a bowl of granola, and walk across the street to open the doors. We would stay, tokin’ and strokin’, till the music was over that night and then go back cross the street and make love till we fell asleep. It was Hippie Heaven. …and the Kingdom of Heaven is moving on.

We drove long and hard And faster than her daddy’s pickup Through the dark and rain And towns of our youth We put up before dawn At the Paradise Motor Inn and Lounge.

My momma told me papa was a rock & roll band She was the dancer, they were slow hand Slept that night in a Chevrolet Day be bob a lewd and I was on my way Yeah, I’m the son of a rock & roll band That’s what I am Get up offa the floor Beggin’ for more You get it anyway that you can When you’re the son of a rock & roll band

Ho’zhooji’ (The Beauty Way) “There is a Navajo ceremony that bears the name "Beauty Way". This term, Beauty Way (Kindaalda’), cannot be precisely translated, however its expression is in such concepts as beauty, perfection, harmony, goodness, normality, success, well-being, blessedness, and happiness. It also can represent beautiful, pretty, pleasant, good, worthy, ideal and perfect. During the ceremony, the patient, the person who is ill, is there in order to re-establish balance and beauty in their life. The reasons why one may loose their sense of beauty, of balance and of harmony are many. But the cure, for the Navajos, is one and the same. One must find the way to Beauty, and if one wanders away from this way, from the Beauty Way, then one must re-establish one's link to the natural world in order to regain it.

To Walk in Beauty means not only walking physically. It also, and primarily in fact, means being in harmony with all things and all people, with all objects, all the animals, all the feelings, the plants, the weather and all the events in your life. It means being at peace, serene in the knowledge that all around you is well and that you are well with everything in your life. You accept and are accepted, there is nothing that pulls you in one direction or the other, the polarities are neutralized, you are one with everything.

You are ready to walk in Beauty.”

In beauty may I walk All day long may I walk Through the returning seasons may I walk Beautifully I will possess again Beautifully birds

Beautifully joyful birds On the trail marked with pollen may I walk With grasshoppers about my feet may I walk With dew about my feet may I walk With beauty may I walk With beauty before me may I walk With beauty behind me may I walk With beauty above me may I walk With beauty all around me may I walk In old age, wandering on a trail of beauty, lively, may I walk In old age, wandering on a trail of beauty, living again, may I walk It is finished in beauty It is finished in beauty All that has harmed me will leave me, leaving my body cool once more.

Within me today, I shall be well.

All fever will come from me, and leave me, leave my brow cool.

I will hear today and see today and be my own true self today.

This is the day I shall walk.

This is the day when all that is ill will leave me and I shall be as I was, as I walk in a cool body.

This day onwards I shall be happy for nothing will prevent me.

I shall walk and beauty will go before me.

I shall walk and beauty will be behind me.

I shall walk and beauty will be above me.

I shall walk and beauty will be beneath me.

I shall walk and beauty will surround me.

I shall walk and speak of beauty.

For the rest of my days I shall be whole, for all things are beautiful. (from Kinaalda’, the Beauty Way ceremony / ancient anonymous Navajo )

Image by Andrew Byrne

W e B y

F l o a t e d C h r i s

B i l l y

V r e e l a n d

After the girls next door moved out, I waited a week or two before meeting the new neighbors. Their cars were only there in the early morning hours- not exactly the time to pound on the door and wax gregarious. I had been busy working late, and forgetting everything about myself, as the divorce was still fresh, and to be at home alone pained me. But at length, they began to show themselves. There’s two of themthe first, Jinn, a young, dark and exceedingly shy Hispanic, is a disillusioned refugee from our local commune, the Zendik farm. Her “roommate,” as I should refer to him, as I haven’t determined the exact status of their relationship, Rak, is the more talkative of the two, and is often in the front yard with his dogs these days. There is no other word to describe Rak, except “freak,” because, as yet, our society has been unable to label people of his type. I recall wondering what our landlord was thinking when he rented to this misfit the first time I saw him, but it didn’t take two minutes for me to see past the flame orange dreadlocks, and the overalls cut off mid-calf above the silver-spray painted jackboots to discern a genuinely nice guy. Despite my initial pedestrian concern about having to share a washer and dryer with their sort, they have turned out to be genuinely good neighbors, who don’t throw loud parties, and keep a nice house.

Rak, as it turns out, is an artist. I pulled into the driveway early one Saturday evening – it was still daylight – and observed Rak in the yard, busily erecting a small metal sculpture of no particular significance amid the shrubberies. I stopped for a minute to be neighborly, and to admire the piece, which he described as “Just yard art, like the one in the tree, over there.” When I looked to my right, in the direction he had indicated, there floated on his back three feet off the ground, a silver child, supported by wires that in turn hung from a bicycle-wheel-weather-vane thing, attached to the tree. A picture of utter peace.

As I looked at this plastic child suspended, supine in the tree next door over the next few days, I tried to cipher what in my brain I recognized about it. It seemed to evoke a feeling from my childhood- perhaps a dream I’d had, or perhaps, as it turned out, an experience, long forgotten. Crowded out by space and time.

My musings came to rest at last in the Houston suburb of Pasadena. This was a midpoint of my parents’ zig-zagging exodus that defined my childhood, which makes it hard to assign places and times to events that happened between the ages of eight and fifteen. I think I was ten at that time.

The singular strangeness of floating Billy was not merely the fact that it actually happened, but the surroundings, and the personalities of the children that contributed to this event. Pasadena is a flat, hot and smelly place- the stench from the refineries hung oppressively low, to borrow from Poe, in the early morning hours, but it was by no means a House of Usher. It was a conservative working class town, and seemed to be made up almost entirely of construction and refinery workers, their housewives, and children. It was summer while we were there, and the cicadas buzzed incessantly throughout, ebbing and swelling their drone with the heat.

Four doors down from the house of my grandparents, with whom we stayed those few months, lived the Farleys. I don’t recall Mr. Farley’s first name, though it might have been Bill, or his exact vocation. My memories of his demeanor and of the tools in his garage suggest construction. His wife, Faye, kept a neat if somewhat tacky home, where the large console TV remained interminably on. Their two children, Brett and Debbie were my main playmates at that time, and I recall being enamored a bit of Debbie as she was perhaps two years older than I, and beginning to sprout breasts. Brett was my age, and we spent many afternoons at the local swimming pools, and riding our bikes in the flood-control ditches.

Brett was not home, however, the day we floated Billy. In fact, it was all Debbie’s idea. The Ringleader. Kids will get bored in the summer, and that day, there being six of us holding a quorum at the Farley residence, we were just casting about for something to do.

As we were wandering from room to room, not finding much to get into, (It was way too hot outside) Debbie made the suggestion: “Hey, I heard about this really neat thing you can do. You lay someone on their back, and everybody chants ‘You are as light as a feather’ and if everybody really believes it, we can lift them up with our fingers.” After the obligatory rounds of “yeah, right,” and “that stuff doesn’t really work,” she convinced us to go ahead and try. Most likely, Billy was chosen for the experiment because he was the smallest of the bunch, and therefore the easiest to believe a featherweight.

We made the necessary preparations- closing the curtains to make Debbie’s room as dark and as seance-like as possible, and clearing a space on the floor. We may have lit candles, or I may be just adding that touch in my rear-view mirror. Billy was laid out flat on his back, with his arms at his side. Debbie had the head. Two others had opposite shoulders, and I and another, the legs. Billy’s job, of course, was to believe that he was indeed as light as a feather, and then float on command. We

each placed our index and middle finger of each hand underneath our assigned body parts, and proceeded to chant, and believe. The minds of children, uncluttered by the cynicism of adulthood, and unencumbered by the dashed hopes and unfulfilled beliefs that accumulate over a lifetime of disappointments, went to work.

Yogic masters and transcendentalists speak of a place where, through intense meditation and a lifetime of study and contemplation, the mind can overcome matter.

Let me tell you, that for children, it’s a lot easier than that. We repeated the phrase several times, perhaps for as long as a minute, then when Debbie had everybody’s assurance that we were all “of the body,” so to speak, she gave the command, and up he went. We raised him twelve, perhaps eighteen, inches off the floor with no effort whatsoever. I’ve thought and thought around the number of fingers, where they were positioned, the musculature and exertion required to lift a person, albeit a small one, and absolutely none of the physics work. But he dwelt there, suspended and still supine, as if supported by a board on wires, and not just twenty fingertips. The laws of gravity shattered, Newton’s apple returned itself to the tree.

After fifteen or twenty seconds, Billy requested that we return him to the floor, so slowly, gently, we did. A few comments of “Cool” and “Neat” were bandied about, but I guess because we were unaware of the difficulty of our achievement, we were similarly unimpressed by it. No one expressed much amazement, and with the completion of Billy’s floating, we all just sort of disbanded, and wandered off our own ways. So far as I know, we never even spoke of it again. Children, becoming adults, stepped out, alone, into the heat and light of the day.

Copyright 1999 / Chris Vreeland

photo by Beni Ishaque Luthor.

Lupe DeLearyum was born in Vera Cruz the day John Lennon died, December 8, 1980. His father was a mysterious Frenchman, who was rumored to be an ancient seaman stranded in Vera Cruz, waiting for his ship to return. His mother was a singer in the band. As a child, he used to entertain his parents with his recreations of the sounds the sea makes at night. Then, while hiking as a teenager in the Yucatan near Uxmal, he came upon the overgrown ruins of a Mayan pyramid. He decided to climb to the top and when he reached the summit, he looked out over the top of the jungle towards the sea. And then he heard a low deep humming sound.

It seemed to be coming from a hole that opened to the platform just at the Eastern edge. As he approached the hole, the sound grew louder. Lupe knew he had to find out what was making the sound and so, he climbed down the hole into a large room near the base of the pyramid. The sound was now everywhere in the room and not only low and deep but high and sweet. He shined his flashlight around the room until the light found a dais against the wall and on that dais was an 8 track tape, a glowing crystal 8 track tape. It is this 8 track tape that never ends that Lupe uses to make his classy compositions today. The sounds from the 8 track tape that never ends are recorded directly from a 1966 Thunderbird and then digitally layered until the desired effect is achieved. Lupe currently lives in the Texas Hill Country.

https://soundcloud.com/fancyspace/sets/lupes-ear/s-AFaZO

Get That Way All the love we keep believing Keeps us planted in the ground We don’t run and we don’t follow We keep the planet spinning round Glow the light that’s deep within you Light the way as you ascend Never take your light for granted You never know what’s around the bend People going crazy and I don’t know why If you take it from the river then the river runs dry You got to get a handle on the spinning sky Man invented time and I don’t know why So much love in the hands of Man There’s so much Love still in the hands of Man So much love, so much love, so much love in the hands of Man Give it up, give it up, give it up, give it up Wild, wild world how’d you get that way ?

How’d you get that way ?

Om Words and music by Johndavid Bartlett All rights reserved Singing Hearts Arts 2013

“We dance for laughter, we dance for tears, we dance for madness, we dance for fears, we dance for hopes, we dance for screams, we are the dancers, we create the dreams.” Albert Einstein

We drove long and hard And faster than her daddy’s pickup Through the dark and rain And towns of our youth We put up before dawn At the Paradise Motor Inn and Lounge

Johndavid Bartlett singinghearts@hotmail.com