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Wednesday, August 05, 2009

That place we camped

Salon just put up a review of a history book about the Cahokia mound builders. This mysterious pre-Columbian group had a big city (for its day), and they built big mounds that are still geographic features of the southern Illinois landscape.

When I was a kid living in nearby Edwardsville, Ill., Cahokia Mounds State Park was where we went on Scout trips. One fateful weekend we camped there, along with other troops from nearby towns. It's an exaggeration to say that that weekend was a turning point in my life, but I can look back on on that 36-hour period and see attitudes and behaviors that set the tone for my entire childhood and adolescence. However, that has nothing to do with the Cahokia tribe, the subject of the book. I just want to say that the park then was adjacent to a drive-in movie whose screen we could clearly see from our camp site -- the outlines of which can clearly still be seen from the Google Maps satellite photo of the area by zooming in and looking just to the upper left of the "A" pin that marks the park itself. The mounds today are squeezed between two busy freeways.

Labels: 1965, youth

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

When I was 21

A lovely post on The Rumpus about what some famous people did when they were 21. While it's a bit hard to measure up to writing "Satisfaction" or "The Sounds of Silence," When I was 21 I did write several songs, part of a never-finished screenplay (though I did write two other complete screenplays before I was 23 -- I use the word advisedly, as they were not properly formatted, a qualification which I knew I would never meet [that was before personal computers and screenwriting software] and that the screenplays would thus never see the light of day), and a number of movie reviews and other pieces for the college paper. The only "grand gesture" I can remember making, however -- grand gestures being the theme of the Rumpus piece -- was to start taking classes at a dance studio. First postmodern dance with Deborah Hay, who had just moved to Austin, then modern dance with Daniel Llanes (whose web page strongly suggests he is still ensconced in the Texas-hippie culture which I purposely left behind in Austin), then contact improvisation. It was the last which motivated my move, just before I turned 23, to San Francisco.

I guess you can't help looking back on the time in your life when you were 20 or 21 or 22 and not see the beginnings of the choices which would influence your whole life. Even so, I almost never write a song or a movie review anymore, and I'm not dancing. But here I am in San Francisco, and I am still writing.

technorati: The Rumpus