Remembering Moondog, Approximately

Louis T. Hardin, better known as Moondog, stood for years on a frozen New York corner composing music and reciting poetry. Can you dig that crazy man? Beatnik sentry, in wool blankets, and a viking helmet?  Sleep on a grate, covered with headlines. He jammed with Charlie Parker, William Burroughs, cut a record with prissy Julie Andrews. Gone now, this Moondog. His icy legions, camped on either pole, are at their ease awaiting orders, when to start another icy squeeze. Real gone.

Comments

[K.K. Brownrigg]

I miss Moondog too. I never got my Viking helmet back.

[Bob]

The helmet is gone forever, I'm afraid. Another thing. The trouble with drawing cartoons on drugs is you lose that tiny monitor in the brain that calculates affect -- as well as the part that regulates intake of Oreo cookies. It's a matter of process, I guess, when you accidentally inhale sevenral herbal jazz cigarettes and weird nighttime avant horn music is playing on the radio and you get out your sketchbook and numbly funble your pen and ink like a ballplayer practicing scrimmage against a line of parked cars. Don't worry. The stuff is out of my system, and I'll soon be back to microfibers and martinis and the modern age. Howl.

[Wee-Bone Talker]

But I dig what you're laying down here. The inspiration only revs the groove higher. More RPM's, more Crazy Fog, more Voot. Viper mad, baby - all the way downtown. Mop, mop.

[Bob]

Yeah, I'm hip. Tonight I'm smoking some peyote and getting out the watercolors. You know, singing the body electric. Go man, van gogh. All that stuff.