Surrealist Weekend

It's that time of year again - the dreaded Bele Chere, Asheville's annual ode to all things drunken, sunburned and redneck. Also, crafts. Not, for the most part, good local crafts but instead shiny machine made crafts from New Jersey and of course obligatory mass produced hippie clothing reeking of incense. I kid, because I love. Or no, not love, love is too strong a word - but kind of enjoy. Although this year I am fuming over the music selections, since all the national acts are ticketed and 95% of the free music is local. I love local music; I support local music - I can see local music 365 days a year for $5 in far more pleasant surroundings and with better sound quality than at Bele Chere, so having all local music does not tempt me downtown. I used to pick a couple of bands I really wanted to see, the kind of bands who don't play here often - George Thorogood and John Hiatt spring immediately to mind - and go, but this year? Forget it. I like Government Mule but I'm not paying $20 to see them outdoors, from a distance, standing up, squashed in a giant crowd with hooting idiots spilling beer on me. I want that experience to be free of charge. And, as you may have guessed by now, I'm not much of a crowd person anyway. I always start uneasily looking for the exits.

However, I did go downtown, because, hold on to your hats gentle & fierce readers: I have acquired a Job. Yes. An actual Job. In my field. In what passes for my Career, or what used to be my Career and I guess is again. It's contract and part time for now but it may become salaried and full time in the very near future and I'm excited and I basically started Friday, at Bele Chere. Since I like this job, or the idea of this job, I'm not going to blog about it, for we all know where that leads. Nevertheless, there I was, starting work - in the middle of giant inflateable Ingles bags and kids swimming in the Pack Place fountain. The sky was unutterably blue and the crowds were much thinner than usual and so it was quite bearable, not to say fun.

But I left Bele Chere (by public transit! I took the bus downtown and back and it was not bad at all!) because I had heard that Walk In Theatre was playing a Monkees movie and I was excited. I gathered up a posse consisting of my friends S and J, who are also old Monkees fans and we plunked our folding chairs down in the Westville parking lot and prepared to discover the answer to that eternal question: who's cuter, Mike Nesmith or Mickey Dolenz? Because Davy's too short and Peter, well, Peter's just too Peter. Although cute. And it's eerie, I must say, how all of them have gotten, well, younger. When I used to watch them on TV they were, you know, old, and now they look about 12.

Yet we were fooled, for Head, the Monkees movie is not cute. No, cute is not a word I'd use - bizarre, yes. Drug induced, check. Psychedelic, mmm hmmm. Makes Eraserhead look like a stroll through normalcy, yup. It may have been the weirdest movie I've ever seen, and I've seen a lot of weird movies. What the hell was it about? I have no idea. I wasn't on enough drugs - I'm not sure there are enough drugs in the universe to make that movie coherent. It seemed to be the Monkees' Manifesto: rather in the spirit of Karl Marx, manifesting away about being trapped in the library, the Monkees used Head to protest their terrible imprisonment in, uh, whatever state of consciousness it was that they were imprisoned in. Possibly their pants, which were scarily tight. It was brilliant and bizarre and there were sudden impossible glimpses of Teri Garr and Jack Nicholson and Annette Funicello and, holy shit, Frank Zappa! And somehow, juxtaposed against the surreal transformation of downtown Asheville into even more of a three ring circus than it usually is, it fit most perfectly.