Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Election issues: We had everything from a one percent sales tax hike
(failed) to an unconstitutional anti-GMO ordinance (also failed). My
main focus was on the berserk Arcata City Council race.

David Anderson: I was privileged to have an acquaintanceship with
David, and always enjoyed his acerbic asides regarding news events we
covered together. He never wrote for the Eye, but said nice things
about it. He did do stories for the Union while I was there.

Here's our story on David's passing: 
http://www.arcataeye.com/top/020122top03.shtml
  

    
Tell us about the new book, Kevin. Is it more best of the police log or
something differernt?

is the point of view "wacky arcata" or something more?
  

    
The new book's core content is similar to Vol. 1, but obviously not
the same items. Come to think of it, that would've made things a lot
easier.

Vol. II picks up where the first book left off, and those who enjoyed
that will like this one. I think we selected more action-packed items
for this book. Plus we had a clearer idea of what we wanted for look
and feel, and had more experience in book composition.

I tried to create a kind of noir pulp fiction look for the cover, but
in the end it took on a sci-fi feel, so it's a genre mongrel. But the
colors are real pretty, methinks! There's a subliminal suggestion in
there, and - woo hoo! - an actual subtext idea, too! But no neeed to
explain those now.

I wanted the inside to carry on with the noir pulp fiction idea, and
you'll see those cues in the form of art commissioned from my buddies
Thomas Doyle, Dave Held, Lush Newton and Bobby Wright. But again I got
carried away with photos, so it kind of diluted the cheap novel motif.

Plus, there's three sidebar pieces by Terrence McNally, Jennifer
Savage and Helen Wilson.

The front cover is somewhat viewable here:
http://www.arcataeye.com/book/

I think this double-posting problem is Safari-related. I'll try
Firefox next.
  

    
Congratulations!

Hm, I've run out of obvious questions like what Arcata is like and how you
got there. I'll think of more, but in the meantime, if you feel like telling
us about anything or if anybody else has questions, please chime in.
  

    
I think everybody knows by now that the Pink house is the courthouse in
Eureka (and I've seen it, and it's truly pink, and hideous.) And that the
Marsh is the nature preserve where people are always trying to camp.

tell us more about some of the places and people that appear in the log (if
you can do so without incurring liability.) There was a guy who was taking
pictures of people in the park and generally being a pest to anybody who was
trying to use the park next to his house. Is he still around? Who are Pete
and the Pirate?
  

    
"tell us more about some of the places and people that appear in the
log (if
you can do so without incurring liability.) There was a guy who was
taking
pictures of people in the park and generally being a pest to anybody
who was
trying to use the park next to his house. Is he still around? Who are
Pete
and the Pirate?"

Poor Mr. Seeders was so obsessed with Stewart Park. He's passed away
now, and I considered advocating that the park he cared about so much
be renamed after him now that it's being remodeled, but his behavior
(some of which is documented in the new book) was so foul that there's
no point in rewarding him. He would run up to kindergarten classes
having an outing and take pictures of the children, seize frisbees that
strayed into his driveway and he even put up a faux "electric fence"
to protect his stupid driveway against minor incursions. He'd call the
police (and me) when a children would trample the grass by playing on
it or when he was holding some kid's frisbee hostage. Then, when the
police officer would try to resolve matters in a friendly way, he'd
start photographing the officer and file a personnel complaint against
him, triggering a required review of the case and wasting all kinds of
time and money. Poor guy - he was  smart, too, and could have been
doing something productive with all that energy.

The Pirate was L. Scott Rebman, now deceased. Scott's life fell apart
thanks to alcohol, from what I could determine. In his past was a wife
and family, and apparently he had held it together for a while working
as a carpenter. I used to see him at the post office, looking at
pictures he'd been mailed of his children. But his final years were
occupied by small-time - I mean really small-time - drug deals and
arrests for petty - really petty - crime. He'd recount in excruciating
detail how a hash deal had gone south at his campsite last night, or
how someone took two hits off the wine bottle instead of the one
allowed by camp protocol, or how the cops had dumped out his
just-opened bottle of rum and ticketed him for camping, etc. he moved
to Hawaii and died of a lung infection.

Pete, fortunately, is still with us. He's a rugged individualist and
incurable romantic who wanders the streets wrapped in blankets and
being rousted from underneath people's porches. I've been trying to
incubate a profile of him, but hard facts are hard to come by. Anyway,
Pete's a genuine and eccentric small-town character.
  

    
I've been reading the log for as long as I've been on the Well, I
think, and I have sort of an Arcata of the Mind that sets up when I
read it. I'm sure it wouldn't do me any good if I were suddenly
teleported there, but I wonder if you'd do us the favor of elaborating
on some of the places, just as you've done for the people, in Arcata.
Tavern Row: what kind of bars there, and how long is it? Seems like a
lot of natural foods joints and so on, a shuttered theater... But I'd
like some horse's mouth kinda details. 
  

    
Too bad that Mr Seeders has gone on to his reward, whatever that is.

yes, let's hear about arcata.
  

    
Here's the enlarged view of the front cover of II. The
extraterrestrial trollop appears on the back. 

There is actual subtext, plus a separate subliminal suggestion on the
front cover. At least I tried.

http://www.arcataeye.com/book/book2_large.jpg
  

    
"I've been reading the log for as long as I've been on the Well, I
think, and I have sort of an Arcata of the Mind that sets up when I
read it. I'm sure it wouldn't do me any good if I were suddenly
teleported there, but I wonder if you'd do us the favor of elaborating
on some of the places, just as you've done for the people, in Arcata.
Tavern Row: what kind of bars there, and how long is it? Seems like a
lot of natural foods joints and so on, a shuttered theater... But I'd
like some horse's mouth kinda details."

If you enjoy Arcata of the Mind, best not come here and see how
insufferably normal most of it is - on the surface, anyway. 

One of the things I always try to do is see Arcata afresh, though it's
so easy to become wrought up in routine and assumptions. I'd like to
have that wowee-zowee feeling I had when I first came here, which I
believe was related to the tiny scale of things and the feeling of
remoteness.

Tavern Row is one block with four bars - Everett's (kitschy, with
stuffed animal heads and all kinds of retro-goop everywhere), Toby &
Jack's (my favorite, if I have one), the Alibi (which features music
and delicious heart-attack breakfasts) and the Sidelines (a sports bar
popular with the young HSU scholars). Marino's, just off the Plaza,
burned down three years ago. The floor show outside provides much grist
for the coplog, especially when cowboy-persons clash with sitabout
spangers (spare changers), etc.

There are plenty of natural foods places, but 10 times as many
traditional sorts of restaurants. (No Indian restaurant, though - you
have to go to Eureka for that. And no salad bar restaurant like Fresh
Choice, either.)

More to come... gotta do some newspaper stuff now.
  

    
"I've been reading the log for as long as I've been on the Well, I
think, and I have sort of an Arcata of the Mind that sets up when I
read it. I'm sure it wouldn't do me any good if I were suddenly
teleported there, but I wonder if you'd do us the favor of elaborating
on some of the places, just as you've done for the people, in Arcata.
Tavern Row: what kind of bars there, and how long is it? Seems like a
lot of natural foods joints and so on, a shuttered theater... But I'd
like some horse's mouth kinda details."

If you enjoy Arcata of the Mind, best not come here and see how
insufferably normal most of it is - on the surface, anyway. 

One of the things I always try to do is see Arcata afresh, though it's
so easy to become wrought up in routine and assumptions. I'd like to
have that wowee-zowee feeling I had when I first came here, which I
believe was related to the tiny scale of things and the feeling of
remoteness.

Tavern Row is one block with four bars - Everett's (kitschy, with
stuffed animal heads and all kinds of retro-goop everywhere), Toby &
Jack's (my favorite, if I have one), the Alibi (which features music
and delicious heart-attack breakfasts) and the Sidelines (a sports bar
popular with the young HSU scholars). Marino's, just off the Plaza,
burned down three years ago. The floor show outside provides much grist
for the coplog, especially when cowboy-persons clash with sitabout
spangers (spare changers), etc.

There are plenty of natural foods places, but 10 times as many
traditional sorts of restaurants. (No Indian restaurant, though - you
have to go to Eureka for that. And no salad bar restaurant like Fresh
Choice, either.)

More to come... gotta do some newspaper stuff now.
  

    
(Double posts can result from the use of "post and go" in Engaged.  If
you use it, you end up at a list of topics for the conf you are in. 
But, what your browser "remembers" is not just the page you are seeing
but the post that brought you there.  If you then refresh the browser,
e.g. to check for new posts, the post gets re-sent.)
  

    

Kevin, I enjoy reading about the travelers and other characters who earn a 
place in your weekly log. Do any of them ever read about themselves, or see 
themselves and go "hey! wait a minute..." ? Or do they remain blissfully 
unaware of the entertainment value their actions provide for the reader?
  

    
"Kevin, I enjoy reading about the travelers and other characters who
earn a 
place in your weekly log. Do any of them ever read about themselves,
or see 
themselves and go "hey! wait a minute..." ? Or do they remain
blissfully 
unaware of the entertainment value their actions provide for the
reader?"

Yes, some of them grab the paper to read of their own exploits.
Uncannily, most people are delighted to read about their unseemly
incidents, mainly because I mostly don't use real names. 

One time a guy (not a street person, but a neighbor from down the
block) got really really super super mad at me for the oddest reason -
because I used conditional terms like "allegedly" and "reportedly" in
relating his incident. I always do that if I wasn't there looking at
the event. In this case, he'd been walking his dog past - of all places
- our house. We had a next-door neighbor with an unruly dog which was,
of course, left unleashed all the time. The mean dog attacked his
leashed dog as he walked by, and as I was familiar with this situation,
I reported the matter pretty much from the victim's (his) point of
view. But because I said "allegedly" and didn't flat-out convict anyone
of a crime in the paper, he called me in a very agitated state. He
repeated the term "allegedly" from the item back to me in a sing-song
schoolyard voice and demanded an explanation. As I tried to provide it,
he told me off and hung up.

But, as I say, most folks - especially the ne'er-do-wells - enjoy
their moments of infamy, I guess because no one else bothers to cover
their situations, even disparagingly.
  

    
Somehow, you manage to report similar (happened before, happened again)
stories and keep them fresh.  I can only think of about three ways to say
"drunk", but you seem to have about 57 of them.  Some recur, like "coctail
enhanced", and some don't.

How do you manage to come up with new ways of describing the same thing?
And how do you decide which ones are good enough to reuse?
  

    
Apparently, King Nimrod has his own song:

<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B0002RSXQY/104-4910557-1372742?v
=glance>

"Cuando el rey nimrod" 
Artist: Solstice Assembly 
Song often done at Hannukah, in the Sephardic language,
Ladino, which is derived from medieval Spanish
  

    
“How do you manage to come up with new ways of describing the same
thing?
And how do you decide which ones are good enough to reuse?”

Yes, that’s the challenge, and you’ve touched on the key to keeping
the Police Log  original and interesting, which is the rules, the
internal logic with which it’s composed.

Repetition's OK if you use "invisible" words, even neologisms, odd
coinages, slang and nicknames that are standards, that have no
effective equivalent and which serve the item. Sitabout, bongo stylist,
or Pink House all come to mind. However, lazy repetition is something
to avoid as time and mental resources may permit.

It’s not unlike playing a musical instrument. One can do these things
by rote, relying only on technique. My friend Tim Gray was the drummer
in a very unambitious country-rock band, and he told me that there were
gigs where he was pretty sure he was playing along on autopilot while
he was literally asleep. 

There have been uninspired weeks where I’ve gotten through it with
marginally amusing, makeshift mechanical wordplay, which is always a
sullen and sullying experience. It’s schlockery and hackism to fall
back on mere technique, like a noodling guitar solo that says nothing.
Best is when, as occurs without predictable pattern or logical
explanation, every item seems pregnant with descriptive possibilities. 

Most of the time, though, it’s simply a matter at chipping away
everything that doesn’t look like an elephant. You sit and stare at the
screen and keep coming up with ideas - new ways to say things in a
valid way, that has some internal rhythm, pun possibilities, or might
be a creative malapropism or obscure reference to something someone
will be delighted by, and do this while serving the essence of the
item, whatever it is. How long you have to spend on it bears on high
your quality threshhold can be.

And of course, writing is about rewriting. So after drafting the
thing, you later print it out on the actual newspaper page and see it
anew, inevitably fixing problems and making enhancements. I was
surprised how underdeveloped or awkward some of the newspaper items we
compiled for the new book were. So I freely revised and smartened up
many of them.

Much of this is so similar to other forms of art, as I’ve mentioned.
Making film, recording music, painting a picture all involve the
composer doing, rejecting, reapproaching, trying to see it anew, and
then letting go knowing that regret will surely soon follow. But it’s
also true that you can screw with things forever, and they usually
don’t come out too well if overly labored on anyway.

I doubt if I'm telling anyone here something they don't already know
from their own creative endeavors. That is, not counting the ones who
get everything right the first time to their permanent satisfaction. 

Fortunately, on a weekly paper, you don’t have time to dwell on all
the infelicities and missed opportunities. You have to move on, and
there’s always another issue coming up in which you can get it right.
It’s an ever-receding horizon.
  

    
It really is an art form, and I salute you for coming up with so many ways
to describe the same stuff.

I started out with crime logs reading the Point Reyes Light which is great
because of those only in Marin crimes like somebody reporting her brother in
law tried to attach a milking machine to her breast, or somebody reporting
their neighbor painted the fence an objectionable color.

The Eye not only has weird crimes, but normal crimes decribed weirdly.

(what's the weirdest crime you can remember? any milking machines?)
  

    
(what's the weirdest crime you can remember? any milking machines?)

This is an oft-asked question for which I never have an adequate
response. I should memorize some sound-bitey tales from one of the
books to regurg on demand.

There was the guy who called the cops about the milk in his fridge.
The milk level in the carton was an inch or so at variance with his
memory of what it should be. In the intro to Vol. II, I mentioned the
moron (in so many words) who, likely addled by speed or huffing or
sheer genius, struggled to rip a stereo out of a dashboard in the
middle of the night while leaning into the steering wheel and honking
the horn, which of course alerted the neighborhood to his cunning
heist.

People argue about shrubs. They impute all kinds of sinister motives
to people who aren't like them, then gather to argue about you looked
at me funny. Neighbors will start with a parking conflict - usually
there's too many cars per student rental house, and conflicts erupt.
Sometimes, once people become nemeses over chickenshit disputes, it
snowballs and then the most prosaic and routine encounters turn into
confrontations. Er, wacky misadventures for you and me, that is.

The real weirdness is in the Why of it all. People go out and spend a
lot of energy doing blatantly illegal and self-destructive things for
the merest of short-term gains, then blame everyone else for the
consequences. And we have to hire personnel to manage them in this
activity.
  

    
One of my favorite crime log things is the bongo limericks. How many
do you think you've written over the years? At some point, you need to
collect them all in a single volume, because no author should be
without a Slim Book of Verse in his catalogue.
  

    
"At some point, you need to
collect them all in a single volume"

We discussed exactly that the other day. Assuming Vol. II pays for
itself, we'll do Vol. III with an utterly different theme and format -
possibly poetic.

I've been on a limerick vacation lately, perhaps because of a paucity
of bongo-related carnage. But I'm sure there will be more to come.
Thanks for liking them!
  

    
When we talked to Kevin in his office, I asked about the bongos - why? why
Bongos? why in Arcata? He didn't have an answer for that but said he
continues to be amused at how people tolerate huge noisy logging trucks and
other noxious vehicles, but let one bongo ring out and they're on the phone
to the constables.

(see, his style is infectious.)
  

    

(Our next interview has rolled into the center ring, but that's no reason for
this one to end.  Please continue!)
  

    
It's amazing, isn't it, how the brain filters our senses based on
conditioning? If you try to hold a conversation on the Plaza, there are
always these awkward pauses as you wait for a truck or motorcycle to
pass. (What's especially fun is when the discussion is a heated one
that had to be held out of the office, and you're in the think of an
argument or semi-hostile interview and have said something provocative,
and suddenly there's an internal combustion-related upheaval and you
both have to wait while the unresponded comment hangs in the air...)

But if some guy breaks out a bongo and starts tapping it, someone will
call the cops. To me, bongos are a pleasant sound. And yet I know
perfectly liberal permissive people who claim to get immediate
headaches and can't tolerate it at all.
  

    
That would be the "thick" of an argument, although "think" sort of
works.... Nah.