Record columnist
Not that the norm is all that different, but there has been a sense of over-the-top hubbub going on down at Ken Sanders Rare Books this month.
It’s been 10 years since Sanders and his daughter, Melissa, moved into their once off-the-beaten-path, now iconic, digs in downtown Salt Lake City and you can’t blame them for gathering a September’s worth of literary friends to celebrate a bit.
Few entrepreneurs have lent themselves more to the cultural well-being of what you might call the Utah alternative-subterranean mindset than Ken Sanders. A book dealer since grade school and a long-professed debunker of myth, he has over the years evolved into one himself.
A biographer would no doubt revisit the “heady” 70s when Sanders partnered-up with the “Cosmic Aeroplane” bunch in order to upgrade the front end of the “books and bongs” vibe they used to embellish their hip and blues-rich music selection.
Once they moved in above the old Blue Mouse Theater down on 100 South, they would help jump-start KRCL Community Radio also located in the building. If one were to graph such movements, it would be the “bookish” hipsters who frequented the joint that would follow Ken and become habitués of his current gathering spot.
And what a gathering! When one moseys throughout the maze of bookshelf aisles at Ken Sanders Rare Books, it is in the company of Ed Abbey, Wallace Stegner, B. Traven, Charles Bukowski, Ken Brewer, and pretty much all the rest who became landscape architects of the literary west.
And many of those same “others” have been showing up this month to pay homage to their long-time cultural posse-mate and the musty cathedral he calls home. As part of Ken’s ongoing mission of “creating chaos out of anarchy,” a who’s who of those practitioners of the poetic, prosodic and musical arts that matter most continue to troop through his doorway.
Much of it is timely, as when historian Will Bagley, author of “Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows” spoke last week on the cusp of the 150th anniversary of those tragic events. A slideshow and book signing with Steve Trimble featuring “Talking with Clay: the Art of Pueblo Pottery in the 21st Century” followed a few days later.
This past Monday saw “Hayduke” himself, Doug Peacock, arrive with his wife Andrea to address the faithful on those themes recurrent in their work war, wilderness, and grizzlies. Andrea’s latest is “Libby, Montana: Asbestos and the Deadly Silence of the American Corporation.”
Doug, the ex-Vietnam Green Beret medic has, in recent years, come to terms with the attendant fame that goes with being the model for George Washington Hayduke in Abbey’s novel, “The Monkey Wrench Gang.” The old beer-guzzlin’ grizzly stalker has become quite the accomplished writer and environmental activist and, as you can well imagine, a most interesting and singular public speaker.
Coming up this Thursday, poet, publisher, and memoirist Charlie Potts will be returning to the scene of earlier crimes. I last saw Potts over a tabletop full of Budweiser empties back when Waylon Jennings played the old Mr. Lucky Club off Redwood Road. Both Charlie and Waylon, figuratively and literally, were just about to take off.
With Heber being as far off as it is, I wonder if Ken would allow me to set up a cot maybe somewhere in back near the “hardboiled” stuff. That way, I could reach up and grab the odd Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett and read myself to sleep each night.
Filmmaker Trent Harris will be showing up on the 14th to shoot a scene for his next feature. And if the opportunity to be an “extra” in the movies isn’t enough for you, poets Sara Caldiero and Melissa Bond are also on tap. It could well be said that Caldiero, among other talents, makes high art out of the low chakras.
The next night is a mix of bring-down-the-house poetry and music, with the latter being provided by the Reverend Willis “Sherm” Clow, the Chisolm Brothers, and assorted other former members of the Salt Lake Alternative Jazz Orchestra.
The irreverently-notorious Buddha poet and editor Gino Sky will no doubt interweave wonderful tales of Richard Brautigan, Robert Duncan, Jerry Garcia, and Hunter S. Thompson with his own eclectic poetry on Thursday, September 20th.
Where does Sanders go from there? How ’bout the legendary Rick Bass on the 24th and river-dory-man Renny Russell, of “On the Loose” fame, the next night. You can’t make this stuff up!
Then, drum roll please, on the evening of September 27, an in-store performance by none other than Rosalie Sorrels who, as Ken says, is “one of the West’s most extraordinary artists and an icon of several decades’ worth of music, culture, art and literature.”
The anniversary celebration will culminate on the 28th when Ken welcomes long-time friends Charles Bowden, Scott Carrier and Alex Caldiero for a collective reading and book signing. What a month! Literature-wise, this is rarefied air, indeed.
Thanks, Ken, for all the years and associations from chasing down Secretary of the “Ulterior” James Watt on “Lake Foul” to putting on that wondrous 50th anniversary of the first reading of “Howl.” Who could forget Alex Caldiero’s breathtaking recitation of Alan Ginsberg’s line in the sand.
Over these past years Ken Sanders Rare Books has become a sanctuary, a haven, a refuge from a less enlightened space and time. It’s a haunt where poet and reader alike can hole up and recharge. When we need a “safe house” more than ever, it welcomes us to the best the written and spoken word have to offer. Happy anniversary!