Apple Jacked by Michael Hureaux-Perez

OCTOBER * NOVEMBER 1997
T H E RaVEN C H R O N I C L E S

`The ABCDE Minded in the Electric Universe`

A RaVEN Column

apple jacked

Michael Hureaux-Perez

Requiem for a Heavyweight: John Blair

Usually I talk about New York foibles in this column, but I want to rave on about a Seattle local this time. John Blair, or J. Fred Blair, died on the twenty-third of June of this year. John was a friend of Red Sky Poetry Theatre for many years and though he didn't come around much after his battle with leukemia began in the fall of 1988, he was a financial supporter of the organization when it was in serious need on a couple of occasions. His poem about his wife Molly, "A True Seattle Girl," is mentioned in the obituary his family composed. I felt this was his best piece of work but like many of John's poems, it didn't resonate real well with the poetry community. Why this was always so is a bit of a mystery to me. I know I've gotten away with reading a lot of all out dogs over the years, and so for that matter have a lot of people who have gotten in front of the open mic at Red Sky. Maybe John wasn't Bumbershoot material and my own attempt to send him there in 1988 was viewed as a patronizing effort which didn't actually do John any favors and, if anything, fed the idea he had that his self-publishing efforts weren't the same as being published. All the same, I thought then--and still do--that if Tamara Janowicz and I were worthy of Bumbershoot, so was John, for whatever it's worth.

Surviving as the man's literary legacy are the many illustrated chapbooks---hand drawn and typed on an IBM selectric--that he put out in the mid to late eighties. My personal favorites were Anti-Peace and Open John. The former featured a cover blurb by Joe Keppler "We have War because Peace Stinks!" and a cartoon of a gap-toothed Mars pointing his sword at the viewer with the legend, "Uncle Mars wants you." The latter featured a cover illustration of an outhouse, bony legs seen beneath the door partition, with the author's invitation to "PURGE YOUR BOWELS! WRING YOUR BLADDER! BLOW YOUR MIND!" Crude? To be sure. In the same league with plastic vomit and the novelty gag gifts husbands used to bring home to shock their wives in the nineteen fifties.

The thing that I found endlessly amusing about his work was how stuffy we all used to get about it. The cartoon on the back cover of Open John, for example, with the country boy who is buggering the goat and shouting to his fainting mother, "Look, Ma! No hands!" Okay, so it's Idaho humor. I still liked it. We used to say about the back country in Alaska that Alaska was a place where men were men, and sheep were afraid. John, in effect, was a lot like the older country sibling who embarrassed everyone, and every so often he took a great deal of glee in that role, and that was when he was at his very best. The inside back cover of Open John had a cartoon with a picture of a shaggy-looking beatnik type with flies buzzing around him, coat held closed by a safety pin, standing over a sitting John Blair, with the haranguing caption, "How DAST you call yourself a poet?" --to which John, glasses perched on the end of his nose, dressed in his finest white shirt and suspenders replies, "Jeeziz Christ! I got to be SUMPTHIN'!" We all know how John looked to us. That was what we looked like to him. Literary pretension didn't impress him. He gave us a taste of his boy Bobbie Burns, that oft expressed wish: "Aye, to se o'rsel's as o'ers se us!

And while I'm on the subject of his passion for the poetry of Robert Burns, I shall never forget when John became the first Scottish reggae poet. For a time, after his wife Molly gave him a snare drum for his birthday, he would come to Red Sky and recite the works of Burns, Sir Harry Lauder and Rudyard Kipling with martial riffs on the snare drum. "Come ye back to Mandalay, where the flying fishes play!" Ta-ratta ta-ratta ta- rump ta rum! Kipling never sounded better to me. I tell you, John did Andre Breton proud during that period. Surreal to the max. One evening when I was doing the door at the 5-0 [Tavern] and John was doing this bit on the open mic, a flushed listener stalked out and turned to me and said, "I can't believe you're letting him do this!" I said, "Well, it's an open mic. He can do anything he wants so long as folks are listening." The guy got even madder and said, "But he's reciting Kipling! Do you support the imperialist outlook of Rudyard Kipling?" And I said, "No, not any more than I do arty leftists who can't make an appearance at anti-intervention demos now." And the guy stormed on out. Love John or hate him, you had to dislike his work an awful lot not to love him. He always seemed to me to be pushing the right buttons.

My comeuppance came back when I was hosting the "Poempeople" mini-series at the 5-0 in 1984, back when I was a fair-haired boy of the poesy lit community and was riding around on my big pink cloud. I had asked John and Willie Smith to do a set apiece for the fourth reading. I should have known I was in trouble when they were both the proverbial three sheets to the breeze before they got on stage. Anyway, by the time they got up they were both stinking, taking turns coming over to me as emcee and asking to read for just five minutes more, and this went on for about an hour and a half until pretty soon it's nine o'clock, and everyone's leaving the reading and there's a band playing next door and right about the time there are three people left in the audience, Bill Shively comes running in and glances up at the stage and says, "What are you? Deaf or a glutton for punishment? Can't you hear the band playing next door?" and runs back out. You know Bill, he's such a shy lad and he always keeps his thoughts to his fucking self. So I decided to end the reading and take up a collection for the features, but in passing the hat after having put a dollar in, I found out when it came back around that people had actually been taking money out. When I told John and Willie this, they both reacted with that weird grin Buddhist monks must have had when they immolated themselves in protest of the Vietnam war. And went right on reading to each other. Such, such were the joys.

I understand from Molly's letter to me that John played the bagpipes, too, and that his pipes were played at his memorial service. All I know is that he never broke them out during the couple of spaghetti dinners I had with Molly and John, but had he done so, Italian Scottish is okay by me. I'm sorry I missed that, sorry that we were so busy discussing the histories of the Bolshevik revolution and the U. S. Civil War and the ethics of the millwright profession and the mysteries of machinist work. And I miss him profoundly, these thousands of miles and years from that time, back when he was trying to fix me up with his daughter Jessica, and her with her shy polite smile and Pop John's glad-handing introductory salespitch. And I'm particularly sad that it took our community two months from his passing to miss him, and I hope I've conveyed some of what a hole in the heart his passing has been to me.

On October 26, Sunday evening, at 7 p.m., Red Sky Poetry Theater will host a feature reading (Mark Svenvold) and an open mic in memory of John Blair. (The Globe Cafe on Capitol Hill.)

© The Raven Chronicles 1997

	OCTOBER * NOVEMBER 1997		T H E RaVEN C H R O N I C L E S

	`The ABCDE Minded in the Electric Universe` A RaVEN Column		apple jacked Michael Hureaux-Perez Requiem for a Heavyweight: John Blair Usually I talk about New York foibles in this column, but I want to rave on about a Seattle local this time. John Blair, or J. Fred Blair, died on the twenty-third of June of this year. John was a friend of Red Sky Poetry Theatre for many years and though he didn't come around much after his battle with leukemia began in the fall of 1988, he was a financial supporter of the organization when it was in serious need on a couple of occasions. His poem about his wife Molly, "A True Seattle Girl," is mentioned in the obituary his family composed. I felt this was his best piece of work but like many of John's poems, it didn't resonate real well with the poetry community. Why this was always so is a bit of a mystery to me. I know I've gotten away with reading a lot of all out dogs over the years, and so for that matter have a lot of people who have gotten in front of the open mic at Red Sky. Maybe John wasn't Bumbershoot material and my own attempt to send him there in 1988 was viewed as a patronizing effort which didn't actually do John any favors and, if anything, fed the idea he had that his self-publishing efforts weren't the same as being published. All the same, I thought then--and still do--that if Tamara Janowicz and I were worthy of Bumbershoot, so was John, for whatever it's worth. Surviving as the man's literary legacy are the many illustrated chapbooks---hand drawn and typed on an IBM selectric--that he put out in the mid to late eighties. My personal favorites were Anti-Peace and Open John. The former featured a cover blurb by Joe Keppler "We have War because Peace Stinks!" and a cartoon of a gap-toothed Mars pointing his sword at the viewer with the legend, "Uncle Mars wants you." The latter featured a cover illustration of an outhouse, bony legs seen beneath the door partition, with the author's invitation to "PURGE YOUR BOWELS! WRING YOUR BLADDER! BLOW YOUR MIND!" Crude? To be sure. In the same league with plastic vomit and the novelty gag gifts husbands used to bring home to shock their wives in the nineteen fifties. The thing that I found endlessly amusing about his work was how stuffy we all used to get about it. The cartoon on the back cover of Open John, for example, with the country boy who is buggering the goat and shouting to his fainting mother, "Look, Ma! No hands!" Okay, so it's Idaho humor. I still liked it. We used to say about the back country in Alaska that Alaska was a place where men were men, and sheep were afraid. John, in effect, was a lot like the older country sibling who embarrassed everyone, and every so often he took a great deal of glee in that role, and that was when he was at his very best. The inside back cover of Open John had a cartoon with a picture of a shaggy-looking beatnik type with flies buzzing around him, coat held closed by a safety pin, standing over a sitting John Blair, with the haranguing caption, "How DAST you call yourself a poet?" --to which John, glasses perched on the end of his nose, dressed in his finest white shirt and suspenders replies, "Jeeziz Christ! I got to be SUMPTHIN'!" We all know how John looked to us. That was what we looked like to him. Literary pretension didn't impress him. He gave us a taste of his boy Bobbie Burns, that oft expressed wish: "Aye, to se o'rsel's as o'ers se us! And while I'm on the subject of his passion for the poetry of Robert Burns, I shall never forget when John became the first Scottish reggae poet. For a time, after his wife Molly gave him a snare drum for his birthday, he would come to Red Sky and recite the works of Burns, Sir Harry Lauder and Rudyard Kipling with martial riffs on the snare drum. "Come ye back to Mandalay, where the flying fishes play!" Ta-ratta ta-ratta ta- rump ta rum! Kipling never sounded better to me. I tell you, John did Andre Breton proud during that period. Surreal to the max. One evening when I was doing the door at the 5-0 [Tavern] and John was doing this bit on the open mic, a flushed listener stalked out and turned to me and said, "I can't believe you're letting him do this!" I said, "Well, it's an open mic. He can do anything he wants so long as folks are listening." The guy got even madder and said, "But he's reciting Kipling! Do you support the imperialist outlook of Rudyard Kipling?" And I said, "No, not any more than I do arty leftists who can't make an appearance at anti-intervention demos now." And the guy stormed on out. Love John or hate him, you had to dislike his work an awful lot not to love him. He always seemed to me to be pushing the right buttons. My comeuppance came back when I was hosting the "Poempeople" mini-series at the 5-0 in 1984, back when I was a fair-haired boy of the poesy lit community and was riding around on my big pink cloud. I had asked John and Willie Smith to do a set apiece for the fourth reading. I should have known I was in trouble when they were both the proverbial three sheets to the breeze before they got on stage. Anyway, by the time they got up they were both stinking, taking turns coming over to me as emcee and asking to read for just five minutes more, and this went on for about an hour and a half until pretty soon it's nine o'clock, and everyone's leaving the reading and there's a band playing next door and right about the time there are three people left in the audience, Bill Shively comes running in and glances up at the stage and says, "What are you? Deaf or a glutton for punishment? Can't you hear the band playing next door?" and runs back out. You know Bill, he's such a shy lad and he always keeps his thoughts to his fucking self. So I decided to end the reading and take up a collection for the features, but in passing the hat after having put a dollar in, I found out when it came back around that people had actually been taking money out. When I told John and Willie this, they both reacted with that weird grin Buddhist monks must have had when they immolated themselves in protest of the Vietnam war. And went right on reading to each other. Such, such were the joys. I understand from Molly's letter to me that John played the bagpipes, too, and that his pipes were played at his memorial service. All I know is that he never broke them out during the couple of spaghetti dinners I had with Molly and John, but had he done so, Italian Scottish is okay by me. I'm sorry I missed that, sorry that we were so busy discussing the histories of the Bolshevik revolution and the U. S. Civil War and the ethics of the millwright profession and the mysteries of machinist work. And I miss him profoundly, these thousands of miles and years from that time, back when he was trying to fix me up with his daughter Jessica, and her with her shy polite smile and Pop John's glad-handing introductory salespitch. And I'm particularly sad that it took our community two months from his passing to miss him, and I hope I've conveyed some of what a hole in the heart his passing has been to me. On October 26, Sunday evening, at 7 p.m., Red Sky Poetry Theater will host a feature reading (Mark Svenvold) and an open mic in memory of John Blair. (The Globe Cafe on Capitol Hill.)
			© The Raven Chronicles 1997