Book forward to "Hand Pi"

My handlers have told me to write a book. I've got a bunch of handlers and they of course have handlers.

Maybe they want me to stop with pain-in-the-ass blogging crap that I've have been doing for years. I guess if this were an ebook I'd use hyper-text to link to Fat Bill.  My oldest handler is Doc, who is really a doctor, told me about ancient texts with text circled around the original text that was the first hyper-text. He also told me a little about being in the hospital room with JFK that day. Even if he wasn't handling me I'd do what ever he wanted.  Doc,  like Fat Bill Richardson and everyone else I write about are real and specific persons.

My youngest handler is a nineteen year old lady named Ebru.  She, like her name, represent one of those media processes that has influenced me and I may have influenced. Ebru is a Turkish word for 'marbling'  the ancient art of floating colors on water. The young woman Ebru has been to Turkey and knows how to handle a gun.

I have another handler who I knew 50 years ago when she a kid and haven't seen or talked to her since ... that I know of. My friends back then would know her as one of the 'Orphans.'  Some handlers don't just come up to you and talk.  Other handlers just move in.

The thread I'm using to to weave the tale was given to me by the late David W. Teske from Manchester, Iowa.

Teske was a self proclaimed idiot savant and star map maker. He described all the old George Carlan's "stuff" of your world as "media" and would say that all memories reside in that media. I'm adding the processes that make that stuff to the Teske media theory. And going along with David Teske's belief in selling media to make the "geedus" and his absolute belief in never leaving a tip ... all "media" pictured in this book is for sale. All secrets drug and sex stories associated with the media are also for sale.

I guess "Hand Pi" is the middle of the book; maybe the nexus of the story or even the "action theme"
of a movie but either way, it is the title.

Where the fuck do I start? Maybe Aug. 1976 .

Somehow Teske got permission to not only 'decorate' the large meeting room for the 2nd Star Trek Convention but also the adjacent 'green room.' The large 8 ft. by 12 ft. Teske star maps were hung above everyone's head on the convention floor and smaller also "marbleized and planetized" star maps in the traditional 'ready room' for the stars who would be speaking. Spacely and I did spacescapes and other collage type art to hang in the green room. I spray painted Spock ears on a Big Shot photo poster of Tim Leary who was speaking at the event.

Spacely, Teske and I had been Star Trek fans for a long time. As a hippie in New York City I didn't have a TV,  in fact I didn't have anything but the clothes on my back but Danny Shanok's family had a nice big TV downtown east side apartment. So that's where I first saw the origin Star Trek TV series.  I remember Shanok 'got it' right away saying the the show was "teaching us how different kinds of people can get along." That was 1968 and it was same apartment where Danny helped me write an application for conscientious objector.

Frame from 16 mm movie "Marshmallow"

Danny was the bass player for what he called "a transcendental rock band" named after the galaxy, NGC 4594.  Later, when I got a job at CBS working for Walter Cronkite as a gopher, Danny laid all of his straight but quality sport jackets on me. Maybe it was the all acid we took or him living the lyrics of his band's songs, "Possessions just vanish from your hands" ... either way I went to work at CBS looking good.

Sold for $6.00 on Ebay

I think I met Shanok at freshman orientation week at Uconn in 1962. It was easy to connect since neither one of us were the beanie. Danny was a hip kid from New York and I was a screwed-up kid from the burbs heading to play football for Lou Holtz. We certainly weren't  going to wear one of those stupid fucking hats just because some upperclassman asshole said to.

University of Connecticut spawned NGC 4594 and the group of pre-hippie friends that gather around the band that called themselves "The Tribe." In the front row of the only gig that NGC played on the Uconn campus was a kid named Peter Torkelson.  The next time I saw the kid he was stepping out of a limo on St. Marks Place having been made Monkee. Remind me to tell you what I think of Peter Tork and why he "made it" (*Inside the LC)

Although I think some of us in the NGC "Tribe" probably had copped acid from a supposed Leary connection in Cambridge, Danny was the first to actually talk to Leary when he went to hear a presentation by the LSD Guru. It was in the late 60s. I think some where in the lower Eastside. Danny came home kind of depressed that Leary "got paranoid" after Danny tried to give him some pot. After all, it was the Hippie way.
Teske came to Star Trek not through acid but through a early job copying scripts from the show. I think David regretted that he never took a copy of a script for himself but Teske was far too ethical to do that but he did keep a copy of the show's letterhead which I promptly copied on a xerox machine.

By 1976 Teske, Spacely and millions of other people, including myself had gotten hooked on Star Trek. It the gone into syndication. Teske compiled TV Guide synopsis of each show and cross referenced it with the Blish books. David came out of the ham radio and Orville K. Snav (BunaB) era but had seen the future when he attend a ham radio convention. Rather than meet one another, the attendees gathered together by being in separate rooms and talked to each other on walkie-talkies rather than face to face.

From Teske's Orville K. Snav  BunaB collection.

5 days a week in Berkely David W. Teske would make popcorn for all  and we would watch a Star Trek re-runs in the 'Rocket Ship', a 8 ft. x 8 ft. by 22 ft. "structure" that I lived in. It in  the back yard of legendary Olaf O'laugh's house on Ward Street. I made the effort to get legal for a couple of years by going the the Berkeley City governing body and getting a temporary permit as a movie set.

When Spacely witnessed the brutal murder of a nineteen year old mentally retarded girl by her pimp right across the street from where he lived, he moved into the Rocket ship. Things were not always cool in Berkeley.

Spacely sitting on top of the world (The Telegraph Avenue Hilton)

              

S.M.I2.L.E

Space Migration Intelligence squared Life Extension.

In 1976 smile meant different things to different people. To Nelson Rockefeller it was flipping-off protesters with the bird, to Tim Leary it was Smile Migration Intelligence (squared) Life Extention.  In 1976 selling marbleized fabric on the Ave;  acting with SLA's Kathy Soliah in the hills overlooking Berkeley; soon to be living at the best hippie summer camp ever, the Renaissance Pleasure Faire (eating those Hand Pi sandwiches)  and getting high with good sex put a smile on my face.

For Teske if it were fall of '76 he would be smiling about coming to the Faire from the Star Trek convention with a large collection marbleize "Celestial Maps" to sell.  Either place, the Ren Faire or Star Trek convention, in the past or in the future David Teske's rap on the statement being made by the "media" he was selling just fit.


He would say about the marbling of his star maps; "It points up the fact that the universe is in motion.
Nothing is standing still. Yet the whole history of man has not been long enough to see any change in the sky.  Even though everything is moving very rapidly in the heavens, we see what the ancients saw. We've captured the galactic flow and combined it with the liquid flow of the marbling. The two combined give you a new comment on the universe."

In a way media with dates or without dates on them might be great on the upside, on the smile side, but media with or without a date media that reminds you of a life changing events can more than knock that fucking smile off your face. In 1976 Patricia Luna Wilson was murdered on Star's birthday.

Nowhere was Teske's weird lighter side more evident than with his connection to Orville J. Snav, fellow Iowian and early primitive conceptual artist.

The Fab Book Teske was a showman for sure but he was even a better promoter. His gig was that he could identify and name every star visible with the naked eye from earth.  He would perform his skill 50 ft. away from a large star map that had very small names and designations that was impossible to see from even five feet away.
He would get someone from the audience to stand and point to a particular star and he would name it with with gusto.  But he believed that acting as someone's agent or promoter while they at the same time promoted you was going to be a great way to get on the Carson show.
So David W. Teske, from Manchester, Iowa teamed up with a guy who's stage act was to draw cartoons by spitting a black substance on paper ... The World's Greatest SPIT-TOONIST. The freakin' guy got on the Carson show and Teske didn't.

This time Teske proposed to team-up with me to promote each other to be part of Carl Sagan's TV show Cosmos. As a way to present our talents I make a scrapbook of ideas and resumes for Spacely, Teske and myself, which I called the Fab Book.