Is there any doubt...

Tequila Los Arangos... a name which will live in infamy. Thanks Purplemeadow for enlightening me (hey! I thought that was MY job).

And so here I am again, up at 4:51 AM (hey Nelson!) having missed the renaissance debut of GLENDALE TRAIN. Damn! According to Toast, they played it tonight. Damn damn damn damn damn damn damn.

Well, while some people were busying themselves with a "golden watch and fob" and all that, I was having a very interesting evening at a poetry reading at City Lights - this one to celebrate what would have been the 80th birthday of Philip Lamantia. The reading was held in the upstairs poetry room to a comfortable, capacity crowd which included Philip's widow, Nancy Peters, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

The evening started out with Will Alexander reading a poem over the cell phone (he could not be there in person) - Peter held the phone to a microphone. While I applaud the effort, the end result was a little like adult-speak in the Peanuts cartoons, sort of the effect of a muffled trombone -- "wah wah wah." Next came Garrett Caples who read a number of his own poems, which I enjoyed a lot. He was followed by a female poet who was not on the bill and whose name I did not catch, and then Andrew Joron read some of Philip's work followed by some of his own. The evening ended with Garrett taking the stage to read some more of Philip's poetry and I especially enjoyed the "babble" poems, which reminded me a great deal of David Nelson. Those should go on a CD if they aren't already available that way (and actually, some of David's "babble" is better). The best part was when Garrett finished, Andrew Joron said "now read them backwards." Ha! David could have done that.