Poet Scott Wannberg R.I.P. (1 Viewer)

Rekrab

Usually wrong.
I just heard that poet Scott Wannberg has died. Apparently this happened yesterday. I don't have any details yet. I knew him from way back, in Long Beach in the 1970s, when we read together in the bars. I saw him read again in 2008 at the Beat Museum in San Francisco. He was an L.A. guy most of his life but had moved to Florence, Oregon (one of my favorite places on earth) a while back. Damn. I didn't want to hear this news, not today, not this summer. Rest In Peace, Scott. You were a damned good poet, and I'll miss you.
 
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You know I'm one of his 4389 friends on Facebook, a tight knit little group.
I received many long personal messages from him and I can understand why people described meeting him and becoming fast friends. I'm very sorry to hear he past. Bless him.
 
Scott was a key member of Carma Bums, a group of poets led by S. A. Griffin who toured America in a 1959 Cadillac (as seen in "Tumbleweed In a Box"), talking, smoking, eating, being crazy visionary madmen poets. Here's a cool video about "Carma Bums Rules Of The Road."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMd-1J6Ldrk

Question for Bill: Was the group of poets we saw read at the Beat Museum in San Francisco, 2005, the official Carma Bums, or a splinter group, spin off, unofficial thing? I can't recall what they called themselves at that event. "Mimeo" plays into it somehow, right? I gotta look at my notes from that time.
 
That tour was not a Carma Bums tour, but an offshoot.

sal.jpg
 
Ah, right, it was the Sal Mimeo group, with many of the same poets as the Carma Bums. I'm looking for the chapbooks I bought/was given free, at the Beat Museum reading.
 
I withheld comment at first, but since it keeps being mentioned, can I just say that the whole tumbleweed schtick is very not funny. But what do I know. I am probably not cool enough to "get it."
 
I love it, not because it's funny, but because I get a good feeling from it. Maybe just because I met and liked both S. A. and Scott, and it reminds me of that day, what a cool experience it was, what fine readings they gave, and the fun of hanging out with them and meeting Bill. Sentimental value, I guess. And I love the 59 Cadillac. It may not be all that funny. I have a silly sense of humor, and I'm easily amused. I'm about as uncool as they get, so I don't know what passes for funny among those in the know. Anyway, you're probably right, mjp.
 
Thanks, but, ah ... mjp is way cooler than me. I'm just an old retired civil servant in a hick town. I wouldn't know cool if it bit me on the ass.
 
It's not a laugh out loud kind of funny. What I get from Tumbleweed In A Box is a mild amusement at how it pokes fun at movies -- especially westerns, road movies, buddy films -- and commercials, and mixed with that a wistfulness, a hopefulness, the idea that we can be free, we can find redemption, there is an answer to life's problems, and it's a simple one (a tumbleweed in a box), and layered over that, my own personal nostalgia for the guys that made the video, one of them now dead, a fine poet and a great guy. It's not going to win any comedy awards, but it works for me. But then a lot of things work for me that would fall flat for others. I like sitting in a car in a parking lot, waiting for some inside the store. It's entertaining as hell, watching people walk by, looking at the cars drive by. I am seldom bored. Guess that makes me the ideal audience. Like I said in another thread, I'd even watch a Frenchman being chased through the forest by Bambi. It may not be good, that French adaptation of 1 percent of Bukowski's Women, but I'd sit through it.
 
If those were my friends, or even people I knew, I would probably look at it differently too. I'm sure it has an appeal to that group.
 

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