Day of the Dead
Move over tired old mantra. Ithaca ain't gorges anymore.
Ithaca is
headshops.
Ithaca's got four,well, last
Ez counted, all crammed in the west block of the Commons, haunts for an array of under 30 wannabe hippies, white Bob Marley imitators, or dropouts that time forgot with their steel gray ponytails, toting guitar cases that bear decals from obscure towns in the Texas panhandle like Snake Zits, plus the usual underage kids that you sort of wished would come down with wanderlust and run away from home so you wouldn't run into them everyday playing
hackey sack, playing bongos, hanging out on the Commons, bumming smokes, modeling the latest Goth couture.
Think about it. That's one
headshop for every 15,000 residents of Tompkins County. All three shops probably carry enough bongs and pipes to supply every man, woman and child in Ithaca. Everybody smokes pot, everybody smokes pot. You gotta wonder about that. Do you think they turn the cameras off after city council meetings and light up? Can you just see the cops going into the ole swat van to sneak a few tokes? Are they getting high in the hills? Stoned in the valley?
Do you think that many
headshops in one town says something about the community? Driving into Ithaca, bringing in a couple of keys. Hey, do you really think there is a drug culture in Ithaca? D rhymes with C which spells Cornell. Look, if you don't catch the allusion buried in the last sentence, go to Hollywood Video and watch The Music Man. Yeah, and don't forget to drop acid first. Wow, man, trombones.
Perhaps the city mothers should take note that Ithaca is turning into the Venice Beach of the East. Maybe they did take note. Yesterday Mayor Carolyn Peterson declared May 8 the Day of the Dead. Grateful Dead, that is. Thirty years ago, it seems, the Dead did a concert at Barton Hall. A stale, slightly sweet smell of
mary jane smoke still lingers in the cushions.
To
commemorate that event, a Dead cover band reprised the same concert at the State Street Theater. Outside, just before showtime, hundreds of Dead Heads or curious fellow travellers milled around the entrance formed a sea of tie-dye
da-
glo colors. Everybody in the line had a Dead story, some snippet of nostalgia or other; a couple of dyed in the wool Deadheads performed little obscure hand gestures and routines reminiscent of the coded Lodge Brother signals Jackie Gleason would show off on the Honeymooners. Down the street, teenagers from
Freevile gawked at the
Headshop store windows filled with ninja swords, Visigoth armor, kitschy posters of scantily clad Teutonic warrior maidens, and, yes, pipes. Pipes of all shapes and sizes, pipes shaped like camels--pipes shaped like M16s, even pipes shaped like
SUV's.
Ithaca, the literal center of nowhere, has gone all out for the occasion. Someone with a marketing bent has gone to the trouble of handing out 8x11 tie-dyed like signage to the local merchants as window displays. Something like Ithaca is Grateful. Yep. That's right. A local Rembrandt is out there in the middle of the Commons cranking out Jerry Garcia portraiture.
Ez was watching this program on PBS about The Summer of Love 1967 the other night. OK. Let's get one thing straight. Ezra hasn't killed his
tv yet. Hasn't dropped it off a gorge, pulled the plug, freed his mind.
Ez knows it's not politically correct to mention owning a
tv but there are folks driving around with those
bumper stickers on their rusted
Volvos who haven't surrendered their sets . In fact, people in Ithaca have found creative ways to conceal from their more politically correct neighbors and friends they too peer at the little pixels. You can buy special blackout curtains. You can buy
tv's that disappear into special cabinets or even fold up. Or you can drive to some secluded spot and watch
tv in your SUV. So, there it was, all this grainy footage of Allen Ginsberg, the Diggers, the Merry Pranksters, Timmy Leary. And Jerry, yes, Jerry and his gang, sans beard, holding a joint, espousing the religion of high
So, ponder this, fellow
Ithacans. What would possess a prim, bun-
couiffed matronly mayor of a respectable college town in upstate New York to endorse officially a bunch of drug-crazed, drug-promoting rock
musicians from a long gone era when drug taking was considered a sacrament?
Money.
Kachink. (Cash register, dummy, as if that sound, immortalized in the Pink
Floyd classic, wasn't now part of the cultural unconscious.) The Dead last played Ithaca 10 years after the Death of Hippie when mourners draped in black actually paraded through
Haight Ashbury with a giant coffin representing the Spirit of the Age. Abba had already conquered America with their gold
sequinned toreadors. Disco was sliding into fade.
Jimmi was dead. So was Janis. (Ain't it something --the cult of celebrity bestows on its victims the right to be called by their first name. Right, Brittany? The great leveller --mass culture.)
Face it. By 1977 everybody had sold out. That brief shining moment of the 60's had been blotted out by the dust of
Kapital. The
instrumentalities of redemption and spiritual transformation, the bong, the be-in, the communal life , had been reduced to the status of commodities. Everything, in the end. was and is reduced to consumption. So why celebrate?
"Your typical city involved in your typical daydream. "
Comments invited at: ezrakidder@gmail.com - Peace, Ezra at 6:31 PM
