Reeling in the Years: 1986
Okay, one more, and I'll quit this memory-lane stroll for now.
Barrington Hall, the gone place, the four-storey den of iniquity and gorgeous walls. 1986 was the year I got to live there over the summer for free, with a job of patching up some of those gorgeous murals that'd been defaced by drunken and drugged graffiti-taggers. I also was given free reign to paint a lot of my own, and also to finish murals started by past students long gone who left them half-done.
This one above was painted on the wall in the second floor hallway behind which was the L-shaped room, the single of Suite #208, where, in September of 1983, the person who was probably to influence the rest of my life more than any other took me on a little ride to the fourth dimension - and an obsessive crush that would last years. On the 29th of May 1986 he was between girlfriends and had casual sex with me. It was great for me, but he was diffident; sadder, afterwards, he was too weirded out by it to hang out and do art with me any more, which was when we'd had our best times.
That room was his room, and the one I'd had the experience in. After he moved out of the commune, I moved INTO it, and to commemorate the significance of that L-shaped room, I painted this - the "real" Doorway into 208. You cannot see it in this picture but the circular object at the top is a clock divided into five segments representing the five minutes that feel like forever...
It looked a lot better in real life than in a photo.
This one was a finishing-of-an-incomplete mural - someone had done the lake scene but left everything unpainted. I added the volcano, the snake, the geometric stuff and the items sitting on the railing. The striped cat was Flippy Floppy, the kitty who was my Barringtonian feline for years, and the crystal with three marbles and a chain with a pendant of the Onngh Yanngh sygn on it.
Onngh Yanngh was the Barrington mascot, a sort of takeoff on the Bhagwan Rajneeshish type cult-leader. In the seventies alumni made a claymation film detailing Onngh Yanngh's spiritual development. "One day he tried to touch God and his arms shrank...but then he took BART...from Fremont to Berkeley". Every September the film was shown ritually to the new meat, followed by a wild nitrous oxide tank party to break 'em all in to our decadent ways. Onngh Yanngh was associated with bananas and some other student had made a giant papier-mache banana, and in the typical way of fraternities, the Berkeley co-op houses had their little rivalries, and the Banana would get stolen by other houses, which, when they were found out, were inevitably the recipients of the Revenge of Barrington. No one ever knew what it would be. My mind be too clouded with the drugs I took to remember.
But I do recall we always got the banana back.
The film is somewhere on the net and there's a mailing list at Yahoo where about 8 of us still have occasional conversations, though just about all the ex-Barringtonians got incredibly straight once they went out into the world; in fact, I think I'm the sole exception. There may be two or three others out there, but we don't talk incriminatingly on a Yahoo mail list so it's hard to tell.
Barrington Hall, the gone place, the four-storey den of iniquity and gorgeous walls. 1986 was the year I got to live there over the summer for free, with a job of patching up some of those gorgeous murals that'd been defaced by drunken and drugged graffiti-taggers. I also was given free reign to paint a lot of my own, and also to finish murals started by past students long gone who left them half-done.
This one above was painted on the wall in the second floor hallway behind which was the L-shaped room, the single of Suite #208, where, in September of 1983, the person who was probably to influence the rest of my life more than any other took me on a little ride to the fourth dimension - and an obsessive crush that would last years. On the 29th of May 1986 he was between girlfriends and had casual sex with me. It was great for me, but he was diffident; sadder, afterwards, he was too weirded out by it to hang out and do art with me any more, which was when we'd had our best times.
That room was his room, and the one I'd had the experience in. After he moved out of the commune, I moved INTO it, and to commemorate the significance of that L-shaped room, I painted this - the "real" Doorway into 208. You cannot see it in this picture but the circular object at the top is a clock divided into five segments representing the five minutes that feel like forever...
It looked a lot better in real life than in a photo.
This one was a finishing-of-an-incomplete mural - someone had done the lake scene but left everything unpainted. I added the volcano, the snake, the geometric stuff and the items sitting on the railing. The striped cat was Flippy Floppy, the kitty who was my Barringtonian feline for years, and the crystal with three marbles and a chain with a pendant of the Onngh Yanngh sygn on it.
Onngh Yanngh was the Barrington mascot, a sort of takeoff on the Bhagwan Rajneeshish type cult-leader. In the seventies alumni made a claymation film detailing Onngh Yanngh's spiritual development. "One day he tried to touch God and his arms shrank...but then he took BART...from Fremont to Berkeley". Every September the film was shown ritually to the new meat, followed by a wild nitrous oxide tank party to break 'em all in to our decadent ways. Onngh Yanngh was associated with bananas and some other student had made a giant papier-mache banana, and in the typical way of fraternities, the Berkeley co-op houses had their little rivalries, and the Banana would get stolen by other houses, which, when they were found out, were inevitably the recipients of the Revenge of Barrington. No one ever knew what it would be. My mind be too clouded with the drugs I took to remember.
But I do recall we always got the banana back.
The film is somewhere on the net and there's a mailing list at Yahoo where about 8 of us still have occasional conversations, though just about all the ex-Barringtonians got incredibly straight once they went out into the world; in fact, I think I'm the sole exception. There may be two or three others out there, but we don't talk incriminatingly on a Yahoo mail list so it's hard to tell.