On Friday I finished reading Wayde Compton’s
“Performance Bond”. There’s some good writing there and some interesting
accounts of what used to be a Black neighbourhood in Vancouver. I guess the
reason that I never saw it was because they tore it down a few years before
1972, which was the first time I was in Vancouver. I actually lived for a while
not far away from what used to be called “Hogan’s Alley”. I remembered that
besides the Black guys from Seattle that beat me up in the late 70s, around the
same time I did encounter another African American who said he was a Black
Muslim, except that he didn’t wear white like the guys from the Nation of
Islam, but rather dressed extremely colourfully in African derived garb. I had
seen him at a drop-in center and thought he was very interesting and so I was
looking at him. He asked me not to look at him but arrogantly I refused to stop
staring. He wanted to kill me. I ended up having an indirect conversation with
him though because though he refused to talk to me, when I asked him questions
he answered them by talking to my friend. He said that the Qu’ran says that
blue eyes are the eyes of the devil and that all white men are snakes. When I
look this up it seems to be one of the many nutty misinterpretations of the
Qu’ran by Elijah Muhammed, the founder of The Nation of Islam. Apparently the
Qu’ran that he had was a mistranslation and that the Arabic word in question
actually meant “blurred” and not “blue”. A few weeks later I saw the little guy
on Granville Street and he came up to me, gently kicked my shin and said,
“Let’s go!” I calmly told him I didn’t want to complicate my life by fighting
with him. “C’mon, complicate your life!” he urged. I just turned and continued
on my way.
On
Main Street just north of Broadway I think, near the area that apparently used
to be Hogan’s Alley there was a fantastic record store with a lot of rare
disks. A couple of friends of mine and I discovered it when we were walking
south to Queen Elizabeth Mountain. The owner was very friendly and when he
found out we weren’t from the neighbourhood
he pointed out the back of a white house across the street and a little
off Main. He said that Jimi Hendrix had lived there with his mother for a
while. Looking it up now I see that it was Hendrix’s grandmother’s house and
that it was indeed part of what used to be Hogan’s Alley.
I
watched two episodes of Johnny Ringo. One story dealt with the aftermath of
what was referred to as the Jackson County War in Wyoming between large and
small ranchers that had happened a few years before. But there was no Jackson
County War in Wyoming. It was the Johnson County War. I really doubt if it
would have spilled over years later from Wyoming all the way down to Arizona.
The
second story was one that involved Comancheros, who were described as
half-breed whites and Indians cut off from either culture and so they’d turned
to crime. But this was historically inaccurate as well. The Comancheros were
white Mexican outlaws that traded with the Indians.
I
started reading and made it well over halfway through Jeff Derksen’s “The
Vestiges”. What a tedious book of poetry! It’s extremely dry and cold in its
attempt to present poetry about the mismanagement of cities and the oppression
of its occupants by capitalism. There is even a section, several pages long, in
which he has placed all of the passages from Karl Marx’s “Capital” that begin
with the word “I”. Putting aside what an anal thing that is to have done in the
first place, the result does not look, read or feel like poetry. It’s just a
lot of text about the mathematical relationship between workers and employers
and value equations. It seems to me he should have at least put the text in his
own words and poeticized it somehow. He could have made it rhythmic; he could
have rearranged the words with the cut-up technique; but it might have been
most effective if he’d made it rhyme. I envisioned him as being a young guy
with a nicotine stained beard and who sleeps in an old suit. But I found his
photo and he’s light haired, clean-shaven and kind of nerdy.
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