December 16—Happy Birthday My Dear Ludwig van Beethoven.

I do not have anything to say about Beethoven, the man who freed music, that has not already been said.

I did discover a very interesting site while looking for an image for this post.

Beethoven's Hair

I was introduced to Beethoven in my early twenties by two newspapermen, Ed Frisbie and Fran Ortiz, both of whom worked at the SF Examiner where I was a copyboy. We would sit around the M&M Tavern at 5th & Howard and talk about the late quartets, the Grosse Fugue ... and I would try to soak it up and I'd go buy pieces they recommended ... and I'd listen to them when I tired of Bowie, Roxy Music, and Captain Beefheart.

I am forever grateful to the two of them.

Fran was a great news photographer whose works - four pieces as a matter of fact - were chosen by the New York Museum of Modern Art for their retrospective of twentienth century photojournalistic excellence. He was a gentleman, a kind man, a great cook, and quite the ladies man: he gave me a lamb recipe for the first time I had a woman over for a serious dinner date. It worked. 

But this is not really a story about Fran, or Beethoven, but about Ed Frisbee, one of the most serious drinkers and most entertaining story-tellers I knew in my early life. It was another era. I had a lot to learn about booze.

Part 1 | Part 2

I've mentioned HoneyBun and the opus Flapping here and in the first chapter. Before we hit the road together, I think I should attempt to illuminate any darkened nooks and crannies in your most estimable cognizance, thereby banishing doubt, confusion from our narrative.

Your humble narrator, circa 1974

We must go back in time, my droogies, back to Berkeley of the sixties and to the last great San Francisco era, the last true bohemia (as opposed to rent-controlled politically-correct permanent underclass, burners and bullshit we find now—bizarro world) in the city, before BART allowed the MoneyPeople™ to stream in and build the ugliest clumps of highrises in the western world, before gay and women's liberation polarized, politicized, and froze all cultural discourse, before the bathhouses turned the city into a plague-ridden petri dish, injecting suffering, death, and prudery into the cool grey city of love.

A quick trip through a happier time and trifling tribulation and extemporaneous titillation.

Attention search engines: brain, image, word, processing, co-ed, naked, spanking, sex, nude, free, girls, money, easy, hot, motor, hunk, nerve, rich, charming. 

A Love Supreme —Chiclet Edition of 50, signed and numbered, with matting of different colors.

—Knox Bronson, 2006, Soap bag and matting board.

Click on Read More to see side view.