Furry Chiclets, a Lawpoet's Creation, by Charles Carreon

Identified as a trouble maker by the authorities since childhood, and resolved to live up to the description, Charles Carreon soon discovered that mischief is most effectively fomented through speech. Having mastered the art of flinging verbal pipe-bombs and molotov cocktails at an early age, he refined his skills by writing legal briefs and journalistic exposes, while developing a poetic style that meandered from the lyrical to the political. Journey with him into the dark caves of the human experience, illuminated by the torch of an outraged sense of injustice.

Furry Chiclets, a Lawpoet's Creation, by Charles Carreon

Postby admin » Sat Oct 19, 2013 2:15 am

Furry Chiclets, A Lawpoet's Creation
by Charles Carreon

NOTICE: THIS WORK MAY BE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT


YOU ARE REQUIRED TO READ THE COPYRIGHT NOTICE AT THIS LINK BEFORE YOU READ THE FOLLOWING WORK, THAT IS AVAILABLE SOLELY FOR PRIVATE STUDY, SCHOLARSHIP OR RESEARCH PURSUANT TO 17 U.S.C. SECTION 107 AND 108. IN THE EVENT THAT THE LIBRARY DETERMINES THAT UNLAWFUL COPYING OF THIS WORK HAS OCCURRED, THE LIBRARY HAS THE RIGHT TO BLOCK THE I.P. ADDRESS AT WHICH THE UNLAWFUL COPYING APPEARED TO HAVE OCCURRED. THANK YOU FOR RESPECTING THE RIGHTS OF COPYRIGHT OWNERS.


Issues:

Image

Fin de Siecle

Image

Demimonde

Image

Idee Fixee

Image

Danse Macabre

Image

Joie de Vivre

Minutes That Look Like Ours:

Biography, by Charles Carreon
Communique, by Charles Carreon
Carousing Lawpoets
Propaganda
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36119
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Furry Chiclets, a Lawpoet's Creation

Postby admin » Sat Oct 19, 2013 2:21 am

FURRY CHICLETS BIOGRAPHY, by Charles Carreon

FURRY CHICLETS – TEN YEARS, FIVE ISSUES, ONE UNFATHOMABLE POINT


The year is 1984. The place is UCLA Law School. The mood is grim for a group of young law students consuming the dregs of their youth in a bitter, last-ditch battle for freedom and independence that leads them to bouts of drunkenness, motorcycle riding, manic swings between study and debauchery. To seize the empty pulpit, there appears a fellow referred to gently as "Johnny Appleseed,” a young-dad hippie from Oregon with his eye on the main chance and a mouth big enough to hold his own amongst some eager shit-slingers. That would be me, Charles Carreon, trouble on the hoof, flute player on the roof.

Enter LAWPOETS. I created a club, using a primitive form of spam. I first circulated a cryptic (not) document entitled, “MINUTES THAT LOOK LIKE OURS,” in which a Foole exhorted a group of co-conspirators in the plotting of a public event, a poetry reading with overtones of a Be-in. I was experienced in the production of happenings. The game plan was simple. Start a club, register with the law school, get permission to hold bake sales in the lobby (bagels sold best), recycle the money into kegs of beer, get a microphone from the school audio visual stash, and have a kegger/poetry-bash in the law school courtyard.

Plan worked like a charm. Lawpoets roared through the school like a case of measles in third grade. Suddenly we were cool. Our crazy Dadaist posters were all over, inviting people to drink beer and hear poetry. I made a poster with a cutout of Ronald Reagan in at a state function gesturing broadly with a determined jaw, to which I had appended a dialogue balloon that said “I won’t be there!” issuing from Reagan’s mouth. “One more good reason to come to the Lawpoets poetry reading,” the poster quipped in rejoinder. The only poster that got the thumbs down was a poster of the Challenger space shuttle adorned with “Lawpoets Blast Off!” Since the Challenger had just exploded, some people thought it was in bad taste. I didn’t think of it that way. I just dig space travel.

The event went off without a hitch. Beautiful babes showed up to drink in the literary madness, and the event was ridiculously well-lubricated. Unbelievable I was able to drive home that night. I remember it was like peering through a fishbowl. If Mr. Limpet had swum up to me I would have given him a lift. But my riders said I was “fine.” Iron constitution of a law student.

Did another poetry reading on the same format. Didn’t turn out quite as well, because I wasn’t as tight with the preparation as the first time. It’s all in the planning and execution. Still, it was cool. What was forged out of the Lawpoets experience was a trinity – Charles Carreon, Tom Brill and John Hayes. We continued to be Lawpoets after law school; well, at least Brill and I did.

The first issue was Fin de Siecle, French for “end of the century,” which is the name of a Ramones album, take note. That’s mostly stuff from Tom, Karen Holden, and myself. I played around with the copy machine at the office I was working at. Great copy machine at that firm. Karen’s a poet I met when I was sitting in my law office skytower slave quarters in downtown LA in like 1987, listening to KXLU, the great student radio station of LA. I’m listening to poetry on the radio, I notice. Great poetry. It’s Karen. I call the radio station. We talk. We become friends. We continue talking on the phone for a year. After a year, I drop by and meet her at her house. We buy beautiful tempera paintings from her, the creation of which she has quite mastered. So naturally, I published her work, and she was kind enough to contribute.

Brill took the next step when he signed up Furry Chiclets in the Poets Marketplace listing, and guess what, the submissions started rolling in. After a few months, I was up to my eyeballs in poetry. Maybe six months later, Brill and I started culling through the stuff, reading it over bottles of beer on the porch at 914 Fifth Street, Santa Monica, California. There on the cream-colored wood porch of a lovely old house Tara and I rented for about five years, Tom and I started reading random poetry from all over the country.

Quite a buzz. Tons of absolute shit. Much bad poetry is written. But the gems popped out, too. Tom and I had a lot of cruel fun savaging bad stuff, making wise ass drunken remarks all over people’s submissions, and sending them back in the self addressed stamped envelopes kindly provided for this purpose. That was good sick fun, of the sort that Tom is always good at dishing up.

That labor of love produced Demimonde. Tidied up the production values a little. It contains my “Pocket Essay Re: Ramones,” a poem that charts the rise of hard-assed attitudes in our little lawyer-boy, and “Nice,” a poem that shows I still have a sensitive side. It’s all about appearance in LA, and this issue has some nice moves.

Two years went by before I cranked out Idee Fixee, the biggest of the bunch, and loaded with vitamins. Actually, this was done in a big push right about the time I was blowing out of LA, having worn out my welcome with the employer class. This motha rewards dedicated application of reading time.

The years grind on, and I’m in Oregon, and I’m a prosecutor, so I see the grit in the pit, and produce the charmingly dark Danse Macabre, a production that for sheer style, I much enjoy. The heavy lifting, final printing of this issue was a bleary-eyed labor of stupefaction after midnight in the bowels of the DA’s office. Like I say, the grit from the pit.

Finally, the last issue, Joie de Vivre, was produced during my first years of solo law practice, a time period that left me with a bare minimum of illusions. I tried to apply these in a decent manner to conceal the skull-like clarity of my revelations, so as not to scare the women and children. This production enjoys beautiful contributions, a slightly gothic layout, and some decent work of mine.

So that’s it – ten years, five issues, and one unfathomable point. The Furry Chiclets story in a nutshell.

Charles Carreon
Ashland, Oregon
April 26, 2003
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36119
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Furry Chiclets, a Lawpoet's Creation

Postby admin » Sat Oct 19, 2013 2:23 am

COMMUNIQUE, by Charles Carreon

From: Lawpoets
To: Lawpoets
Re: Lawpoets

MINUTES THAT SEEM LIKE OURS

***

It is easy to find fault, if one has that disposition. There once was a man who, not being able to find any other fault with his coal, complained that there were too many prehistoric toads in it.

-- Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar

Chair: Thank you, Mr. Twain, for those opening words. And we'll get on to the business at hand. Treasurer, may we have your report?

Treas: Oh, certainly. We're in the black these days, with $60 in the Cash account, thanks to the incredibly hard work done by numerous self-declared Lawpoets at the recent Bake Sale. But we need more than that to pull off the event. The keg will be $45, and the microphones and PA will cost us $35 to rent from Audio Visual Services. We also need to spend about $10 to publicize the event. So we need about $30 more than we have on hand right now.

Foole: We can sell popcorn at the fair.

Sec: It's not a fair, it's a poetry reading, Foole.

Foole: But I want it to be a fair. There should be banners and balloons. There should be minstrels.

Sec. You are a fool, Foole. People will laugh at you.

Foole: Have a drink.

Organdizer: Ms. Chairperson, I have a list here of things which we need to have Lawpoets get and lend to the purpose of the greater good. I think most everything is here that we'll need. If anyone can bring an item, please write down what you can bring and your name and phone number on a piece of paper and put it in Charles Carreon's box.

Lots of popcorn

Lots of lemonade

Lots of unshelled Peanuts

A Real loud, decent sounding cassette player

Music Tapes

Japanese Paper Fish, Banners, Pretty Kites that float on the breeze, Streamers, etcetera. (We need as much of this as we can get, so bring anything that seems like it might hang well from the patio rafters.)

Milk Crates or Patio Blocks to support the Stage Platform

A Big Piece of Fabric to Hang on the Wall behind the Readers (Bedspreads, Curtains?).

Donations of beer, tequila, salt and lemons for the poets. (None of that Faulknerian whisky-drinking, please.)

Chair: Thank you for the list, Organdizer. You are invaluable. Publicist, will you present your report?

Pub: We are getting firm commitments from people who wanna read. Beginning next week we're doing a multicolored flyer blitz to solicit more readers. All next week we'll be taking names and assigning a time period for readers. Any Lawpoets who wanna read, call Charles at 397-5426 and he'll sign you up. Do it soon, so we can structure the schedule.

We're also working on a flyer to publicize the event itself, which we'll circulate March 17th to the 20th.

Yeah, and DON'T FORGET, mark it on your calendar with blueberry jam! THE POETRY READING IS THURSDAY, MARCH 20TH!!!

Chair: Are we through?

Sec: I think so.

Foole: A rose by any other name would smell as sweet . . .
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36119
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Furry Chiclets, a Lawpoet's Creation

Postby admin » Sat Oct 19, 2013 2:24 am

Carousing Lawpoets

Image
John Hayes

Image
Karen Holden and John Hayes

Image
Karen Holden and John Hayes

Image
Nancy Braver and Karen Holden

Image
Karen Holden and John Hayes

Image
Tom Brill

Image
Tom Brill, Tara Carreon, Robin Kaufer

Image
Karen Holden, John Hayes, Tom Brill, Tara Carreon, Robin Kaufer, Nancy Braver

Image
Nancy Braver

Image
Nancy Braver and Karen Holden
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36119
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am

Re: Furry Chiclets, a Lawpoet's Creation, by Charles Carreon

Postby admin » Sat Oct 19, 2013 2:49 am

PROPAGANDA

Image

Image

Image

Image

Image

Image

Image

Image
admin
Site Admin
 
Posts: 36119
Joined: Thu Aug 01, 2013 5:21 am


Return to Carry On with Carreon

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 7 guests