The Carma Bums

The Carma Bums are a bunch of middle aged and older weirdo poet types who spout, shout and sputter spontaneous poetic prose, bop prosaic verse, music, poetry and satire. The core group of The Bums met at a long gone cafe in Hollywood was upon a time known as The Water Espresso Gallery, which served up dysfunction and not much else for a few brief years in the shadow of the old Lhasa Club at the corner of Hudson and Santa Monica Blvd. across the street from the old Kit Kat Klub. At The Water Gallery, we all held court on Wednesday nite for the open poetry reads, and over time we all lost our hair, our minds, all sense and donned imaginary capes to become The Lost Tribe. The Lost Tribe were and are: Mike Bruner, S.A. Griffin, Doug Knott and Mike M. Mollett. The Tribe functioned as a crack perofrmance poetry group, toured a bit, and peaked by appearing on the old Gong Show, winning first place with the lowest score ever: 8. Then, after The Notrious Bald E. Bald (aka S.A. Griffin) visited mile high Denver, returning to the city of lost angels inspired by what he smoked and heard at mile high Denver and made some phone calls... enter The Carma Bums! The Carma Bums were and are: Mike Bruner, S.A. Griffin, Doug Knott, Mike M. Mollett, Bobbo (Robert) Staron and Scott Wannberg. Bobbo left the group by 1990, but returned for the Lost Tour in '92. We are and were a combination of punk, beat, folk, weed, bad acid, a 1959 Cadillac named "Farther", a broken down bus called "Onword", Thoreau, Denny's, The Royal 8 Motel, more dysfunction, Scot Kelman, Yale, Missouri, San Francisco State, USAF, Pasadena, the projects, the world as told from the other side, gamblers from the inside, a primal laugh, a primal scream, a wake dream, Leonard Cohen, Charles Bukowski, Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, Groucho Marx, Diane di Prima, Bob Dylan, John Prine, Jung, wigmes, pygmies, bigmes and digmes, lost maps, backwards dancing, Jeffoto, Jack Brewer, Ellyn Maybe (lone Carmababe), The Onyx Cafe, more weed, smooth scotch, Neal "Skooter" Taylor, Lon Speigleman, Dadaland, ZtZu, Blue Satellites, The Iguana Cafe, Lorraine Perrotta, Ron Maxson, The First Amendment Hallelujah Chorus, Page Smith, Eloise Smith, Philip Levine, Laurel Ann Bogen, Henry Miller Library, Big Sur, Little Armenia, Middle America, big love, small tokens, duve, start from zero, secret tours, no seat belt tours, international superhighway tours, and remain words without end... to be continued.
To continue... in 1994, we, The Bums, forking over alot of money we didn't have, all travelled to misty northwestern territories of The University of Washington at Seattle for what has become known as The Summer of Natural Born Killers. At the time, Mike Bruner was completing his masters programs in rheotric and communication theory and had become friendly with Klockner, the computer nerd that ran that particular game at the campus facility. Long story short, Bruner was convinced after some dialogue with Herr Klockner, that we needed to be surfing the net. Indeed he was correct, and ultimately, we did. So, for a mere $3,000 investment we would get set up and running. In time, this adventure would become The Carma Bums International Superhighway Tour of Words. We all winged our way up there, lived in the campus dorms for a week and spent countless damned hours slaving over the mysterious computers, hacking information and teaching ourselves how to create html computer code just in order to input text! Sheeee-it!!! Outside of raging passive aggressive behavior while sitting on his barefoot ass, Klockner did nothing but rage, rage, rage against the coming of The Carma Bum light! However, we did benefit from the incredible artistic genius of Robert Telck, who created the wallpaper image you see here now. He was our savior. So, with a lot of help from Telck, by 1995, The Bums were up and running on the net with what is believed to be the very first interactive poetry website ever on the net. The site included sound files, which included our radio show, "Attack of The Giant Burrito", which you hear playing now. The pages also included hyperlinks, unheard of at the time, oodles of poetic text, and hordes of incredible images created for us by the most noble Master Telck.
We surfed U of Washington's server for about a year or so and were taken down. Soon, we were moved to USC's server where my then girlfriend now wife, lovely librarian Lorraine Perrotta, was working in periodicals. That lasted about a year or so as well. Then the pages came tumbling down... That is when we bought our first serious computer ~ a Gateway as I recall. Now we rock on Mac, Mac baby... It was with the purchase of our Gateway that I began to sit down with another librarian friend from USC who began to tutor me in the Dada realities of cut and paste and the net. In the beginning, there was porn. Porn and the academy.
Holy fools, angels and ministers welcome... your presence is hereby requested! Bring your love and bring your good time. It's 4:20 somewhere.