BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE BOY:
Rode the early into the Emerald City listening to stories
from skinny girls with Scandinavian hair & sunken
cheeks – must be the new look season. The light was
stark & bright, so I flicked on the latest app turning
colours into shapes, disarming the violence of the
morning, everything sculptural, inviting in Black & White.
Down in the tubes they got posters for Merce, John,
Robert & Jasper, the clan of the Black Mountain College
laying paper trails, telling me I’m on the right road.
Popped out the hole at Oxford Circus, cut down to
Soho by back alleys, dodging the vibrations of pretentious
coffee bars selling luxury discomfort.My hungry phone doesn’t
want to receive emails any more,it just wants to take pictures
in Black & White inspired by the masterpieces brother Warwicker
captures of abandoned dust on the shop windows of New Oxford Street.
A master’s eye, a genius of subtlety, drives a silence car
through barricades of derivative graphics up the street of
crocodiles.
John & me drink Black Coffee with the famous in a Berwick Street
coffee boutique, talking machine gun poetry. He looks electric,
more alive than I’ve seen him in years, living north of the
equator suits him. Ninety minutes later I’m on another train
to another city where the boy in the Apple Store restores my faith
in humanity with a little simple kindness, from the look in his eyes
I could tell we were from the same tribe. I shake Dave’s hand & head
in search of Music & coffee, somewhere to write the conversation
I witnessed on the Emerald City tube – two boys remembering they were
young bucks once, shaved heads on the street, wild & loose.
I buy more Dylan, Joni & a bunch of eye candy covers, reminds me of
a time I couldn’t afford more than one album a month. I dip into the
record shop, clock ticking on the last of the physical palaces of
recorded music,nod to the lad behind the counter & ask the usual,
“Any news?” he shakes his head.
There’s a look in his eyes that’s the same as the guy
in HMV Oxford street earlier,
“Thanks for asking though man” he smiles, like he
always does, a fellow traveller on the uncertain road.
This is my tribe.
(K)
Karl Hyde 
That was a great entry, Karl. Did my coffee good. Thanks for the text. Stay positive – looking forward to your new album. Greetings from Iceland.
“pretentious coffee bars selling luxury discomfort”, brilliant. J
Hi Karl, A great pleasure to meet you this afternoon. Good luck! Don
Karen lived near Black Mountain College. The BMC Museum still in operation. Asheville, NC. Also host to the Moogfest usually the last weekend of October. http://www.blackmountaincollege.org/
Time to wash my hair, drag a comb across my head.