“A space. Who are you? The cat’s mother. A time. What do you lack? The look of a queen.” – James Joyce (Finnegans Wake, page 223)

One of my mentors, Mary Jane Schoultz, turned McLuhan, Mailer, Ivan Illich and Bucky Fuller onto feminism in the early 70’s. World-famous archaeologist Marija Gumbutas was teaching matrisitc consciousness: that we are more hard wired forcooperation than violence. She spawned Riane Eisler’s book THE CHALICE AND THE BLADE which promoted “partnership.” When I asked the theater director Peter Sellars, “what caused matriarchy?”, he responded, “A mother holding her baby.” Now that is the essential “safe place.” The end of this essay goes full circle by referring to Medea, the powerful sorceress, enchantress, and high priestess who nurtures the peaceful place.

Visionary jazz shaman and Godfather of Afrofuturism SUN RA is featured in the 2026 PBS American Masters series. Tune in to “Sun Ra: Do The Impossible.” His mantra and ultimate anthem “Space is the Place” was revealed on the 1973 album and title track, espousing liberation by fusing of science fiction and ancient myth. Here we are in 2026. Is there any “safe space,” any “safe places”? Sun Ra’s lyrics are hopeful:

Space is the place, yeah, space is the place . . .
A place that’s really free,
There’s no limit to the things that you can do,
There’s no limit to the things that you can be,
Your thought is free,
And your life is worthwhile…
It’s no disgrace to want to know,
How to live to really be free,
A vast and endless free…

Venice is all about peace and freedom. We must propagate this vision into action daily. Turn the rejections into redirections, and the weaknesses into launch pads of positiveness. How do we create and nurture an authentic safe place? Is it impossible? Consider Sun Ra’s philosophy: “The impossible attracts me, because everything possible has been done and the world didn’t change”. I read that in a New Yorker article (June 28, 2021) titled ”How Sun Ra Taught Us to Believe in the Impossible.” Sing along with his equation: “Create a better music and you create a better world.” Their forward-driving comic sounds are designed to transport listeners to safe space places. Sun Ra and his Arkestra even performed at McCabe’s Guitar Shop in Santa Monica in 1988.

Ludwig Bemelmans, the writer best known for the “Madeline” picture books published a book entitled “The Happy Place”, in 1952, the year before I was born. It explores themes of kindness, the true meaning of “giving”, that safety and companionship are more valuable than luxury. True contentment -a “happy place”- is finding peace by sharing with others.

Which place do you most seek? “Happy” or “Safe” or “Sacred” or “Brave” or “Free” or “Inner” or “Outer” or “Parking” or “Personal” or “Empty” or “In-between” or “Open” or “Cozy” or “Head” or “Negative” or “Quiet” or maybe even “Wild” space? Tell me your pursuits, please.

One of the most interesting figures in the history of 20th-century music, Ferruccio Busoni declared, “Music is born free, and to become free is its destiny.” Composer extraordinaire Morris Eggert was on my podcast “I’m probably wrong about everything,” and told me that music needs the wild space of freedom. Shall we seek a “free” space?

I saw a bumper sticker that read “The worst things in life are free.” Consider “Freedom Means Everything Free” which was Emmett Grogan’s rallying cry. He was the “tough-guy hippie” who wrote “Ringolevio: A Life Played for Keeps,“ a renowned 1972 memoir detailing his life as a leader of the Diggers in 1960s San Francisco.

So many spaces, so little time. In 1958, Gaston Bachelard aired his insights in the book “The Poetics of Space”, a phenomenological study of how intimate domestic spaces—such as houses, attics, cellars, drawers, and nests—shape human consciousness, memories, and dreams. Bachelard claimed that inhabited space transcends geometry; it is a “felicitous space” that shelters daydreaming and influences our sense of being.

Artist Carl Andre said “sculpture as place” around 1966 to describe works that were created by positioning units on the floor, allowing them to be walked on. He explained “I use place in a kind of aphorism that seems to work for me about shifting from form in sculpture to structure in sculpture to what I wound up with as place in sculpture.” He explicitly defined his concept of “place” as: “An area within an environment which has been altered in such a way as to make the general environment more conspicuous.” Is this place we call Venice “obvious” to the eye? Who are you going to believe, my eyes or yours? A space place, a wild place, a safe place? It’s a never ending story.

The term “brave space” has been suggested to replace “safe space” for learning about diversity and social justice issues. Venice has always been a place for courage.

The story of Robert Akira Nakamura, who was born in Venice, CA on July 5, 1936, fleshes out the “safe place” theme. He passed on June 11, 2025. Here’s some of his NY Times obit by Jeré Longman (12-23-25):

==After the outbreak of World War II, Robert Nakamura and his family, like 120,000 other people of Japanese descent, were forcibly removed from their home and placed in a remote internment camp (Manzanar). It was 1942, the year Mr. Nakamura turned 6. He would later recall that on the roughly 250-mile trip north to the camp from Los Angeles in a convoy of buses, one gas station owner refused to let any of the displaced people aboard them use the bathrooms. On Mr. Nakamura’s second day of internment, he cried after getting lost amid the camp’s identical tar paper barracks. When he brought home a poor report card from his camp school, his mother, who gave birth to another son while the family was interned, sobbed with despair for more reasons than bad grades. Making sense of this early, indelible trauma became the leitmotif of a trailblazing career during which Mr. Nakamura became widely known as the godfather of Asian American media. As an independent filmmaker, photographer, teacher and activist, he explored issues of justice, identity, memory and racism. He was a founder of Visual Communications, the oldest community-based organization of Asian American and Pacific Islander filmmakers and media artists in the United States…(He made many important films.)… In “Third Act” (2025), a documentary made by his son, the filmmaker Tadashi Nakamura, Mr. Nakamura spoke about the ambivalence he felt toward Manzanar. He and his friends in some ways had typical high-spirited boyhoods in the camp, he said, making slingshots from tree branches, playing adventure games and keeping scorpions, lizards and snakes in bottles as pets. But he was also left with scars from a shameful episode of American history, one that he said left him with a feeling of inferiority, lost pride and a sense of otherness. “The camp experience, or just generally living in a racist society, really messes up your mind,” Mr. Nakamura said in “Third Act.” “It continues, and I don’t see any cure for it other than dealing with it through the arts.”

Until Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, Mr. Nakamura considered himself an “all-American kid,” Ms. Ishizuka, his wife, said in an interview. But after the attack, his white friends quickly turned on him, flinging rocks and epithets. “All of a sudden, he wasn’t who he thought he was,” Ms. Ishizuka said. “He realized he had the face of the enemy.” After the war, the family returned to Los Angeles only to encounter more racism. Robert joined an all-white Boy Scout troop but was not allowed to swim with the others at a public pool. He said in “Third Act” that he had been embarrassed that his father was a gardener and had wished that he had another, one without a Japanese face or accent. It was, he said, the “ultimate self hatred, wanting to be someone else.” “There were times when I almost wanted to go back to the camp,” he said. “At least at the camp, you had friendly Japanese American faces around you.”…

He finally began to find himself in the late 1960s by joining the social and political awakening of the Asian American Movement. “It gave meaning to my life,” he said in “Third Act.” Filmmaking grew, for him, into a form of resistance, and his experience at Manzanar became a source of empowerment instead of shame. ==

This obit moved me to tears, especially when Robert says “I almost wanted to go back to the camp.” How can we constantly review what it means to really feel safe, and where we really feel safe? Robert turned a breakthrough into a breakthrough. Let’s process the story of an inspired and inspiring Venice-born icon. We can make the world a better place. Some people were fortunate to screen this April 11, 2026 program at UCLA entitled, “Toward a More Perfect Rebellion: Celebrating the Legacy of Robert A. Nakamura.” Let’s hope it repeats. Our safety conversations carry on . . .

Mic drop sum more cool quotes to needle somnambulism:

“The only safe course for the defeated is to expect no safety.” – Virgil, Aeneid

“That there is no longer an American frontier. … And we stand today on the edge of a new frontier, the frontier of unknown opportunities and perils. … Beyond that frontier are uncharted areas of science and space, unsolved problems of peace and war, unconquered problems of ignorance and prejudice, unanswered questions of poverty and surplus. … I’m asking each of you to be pioneers towards that New Frontier.” – JFK.

“You have to pick the places you don’t walk away from.” – Joan Didion.

“An object is capable of creating the place in which it is shown.” – artist Roni Horn.

“I am looking for the similar in public spaces, though what atrracts me is the differences between these similarities.” – artist Candida Hofer.

“I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage.” This is the first line of Peter Brook’s “The Empty Space” is perhaps his most famous quote, and a signature of his heralded career, which spanned seven decades and included some of the most influential theatre productions of the 20th century.

“In some far off place
Many light years in space
I’ll wait for you.
Where human feet have never trod,
Where human eyes have never seen.
I’ll build a world of abstract dreams
And wait for you.” -Sun Ra

Sun Ra once said, “I leave space open as the term should be, to fill what you want to fill it with.” What do you want?

The “Sun Ra” of literature, James Joyce invented the Venice BeachHead (hard copy and online version) and disguised it as a book, FINNEGANS WAKE. In this epic acid trip, space functions as a dream operating on a “cylindrical day,” though really it radiates the liminal “in-between” night space. Sleep walk through the symbolic and mythological space where characters transform into cosmic figures, such as HCE (Here Comes Everybody), who represents the world, a tree, the landscape, Dublin, Humpty Dumpty and historical figures like Finn MacCool, Oliver Cromwell, or Adam. His wife, Anna Livia Plurabelle (ALP) represents the river and the eternal feminine. You can experience this amazing dream-space (a living organism) by reading the book aloud with a group of people. Sun Ra expanded Joyce’s “fling it aboard again amid planetary music” into having fun with “interplanetary music.” Oh no, Gerry’s gone off da edge again. Is your Menippean satirized brain getting scrambled? Are you spacey yet? Reading Finnegans Wake is not like being lost in a dense “jungle of woods” or a “jungle of words” or a “jungle of woulds.” Have we entered the “Twilight Zone”? Did Rod Serling influence the Star Trek theme of “Space: the final frontier”…”to explore strange new worlds; to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before”? Wake up to James Joyce writing “You is feeling like you was lost in the bush, boy?” on page 112 of Finnegans Wake. Create new metaphors, new questions and new space.

Researchers, such as those at UC Berkeley, have used Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to analyze Finnegans Wake, comparing it to how AI learns language in its “latent space”—the hidden, non-linear, and often illogical layer of information processing. So join us at VHM on May 15 to explore “Venice AI as IA.” Where is the center everywhere and the margins nowhere? Is logic itself based on a metaphor? What is a meta for? For Venice?

Here’s a pretty good summary of Marshall McLuhan on space (please remember that he advised “Nobody could pretend serious interest in my work who is not completely familiar with all of James Joyce and the Symbolists.”): McLuhan distinguished spaces based on the dominant sensory ratio of a media environment, separating them into linear/segmented visual space, simultaneous/immersive acoustic space, and the tactile “resonant interval” between them. He intuited that phonetic, typographic, and electronic technologies shape human perception by organizing experience into these, often competing, spatial modes.

Visual Space (Linear, Segmented): McLuhan associated this with the eye, phonetic literacy, and print culture (Gutenberg Galaxy). It is uniform, sequential, continuous, and connected. It creates a “closed world” with a fixed, centered, and detached perspective, forcing a “one-at-a-time” sequential perception. It is more left hemisphere of the brain and more figure (from Gestalt psychology).

Acoustic Space (Simultaneous, Immersive): Associated with the ear and oral/electronic culture, acoustic space has no center and no margin. It is a “seamless web” or “spherical” environment where sounds come from all directions simultaneously, providing an immersive, holistic, and “organic” experience. It is dynamic and constantly changing. It is more right hemisphere of the brain and more ground (from Gestalt psychology).

Tactile Space (The Interplay): Tactility for McLuhan was not just physical touch, but the interplay of all senses simultaneously, representing the “resonant interval” or the boundary between visual and acoustic space. It is the “contact” or “touch” point where senses interact rather than just acting sequentially. In other words, the resonating interval, the “in-between ness” is where it’s at. The gap is where the action is.

Clinton Ignatov explains that people who need to conceptualize (or systematize everything they come across) are stuck in visual space. Those who make free associations, think in dream logic, and see strange coincidences everywhere, they live in acoustic space. And, because they are “in touch” with all the different forms of space, tactile people are able to “let go” of one sensory mode of perception and leap into another.

Some of these McLuhan probes are detailed in Cameron McEwen’s amazing website McLuhan’s New Sciences | When we push our paradigms back, we get “history”; when we push them forward, we get “science”. (Take Today, 15) I am also grateful to Clinton Ignatov https://www.teamhuman.fm/episodes/224-clinton-ignatov and Andrew McLuhan https://themcluhaninstitute.com/ Though some of these probes in McLuhan space may be from Professor Quackenbush of the University of Fredonia. He may have marshalled knee deep in the swamp muck with Orson Welles over this line from page 98 of “Winnegans Fake”: “The war is in words and the wood is the world.”

The University of Alberta Press has published 3 major books that delve deep into how space shapes our behavior: “The Museum as Large-Room Pinball Machine – A 1967 New York City Seminar Featuring Marshall McLuhan, Harley Parker, and Museum Professionals” Edited by William J. Buxton, “The Culture Box – Museums as Media” by Harley Parker, and “Harley Parker – The McLuhan of the Museum” by Gary Genosko. Mallarme said the world was made in order to result in beautiful books, so read’em. Here’s more: “McLuhan in Space: A Cultural Geography” (2002) by Richard Cavell, and “Through the Vanishing Point: Space in Poetry and Painting” (1968), by McLuhan & Harley Parker, And if moving image is more your bag, watch the fun 1973 film “PICNIC IN SPACE” with McLuhan & Parker, free on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tSfxX93dGnM These highly recommended tomes are essential reading to explore McLuhan’s salient probes into our sensory perceptions, and the enduring value of creating new questions and new metaphors… and new spaces.

Liminal space vibrates between night (Finnegans Wake) and day (Ulysses). The hero of Ulysses, Leopold Bloom, experiences the “cold of interstellar space” within his own inner consciousness. “Geometric space leads to a conception of being where withdrawal is erased.” – McLuhan. Bingo! “Only the hand that erases can write the true thing” – Meister Eckhart. In the WAKE, “time” (the ear) is associated with cyclical, flowing, or “downstream” movement (like The River Liffey), while “space” or “space-time” (the eye) represents a more static, spatialized “upstream” mode, often involving recurring, distorted landscapes or “nightmarish” dream-locations. Dante wrote that if you want to go to paradsie you have to go beyond time and space.

Venetians found paradise marching in the N’Orleans parade on Feb 22, 2026. Our second line “let the good times roll,” aka “Bon ton roulet.” Thanks to Jessica & Johan for hosting this community ceremony for over 22 years. Arthur “Wizard of Venice” Reese started it in the 1910, then Frank Zappa lead a second line parade out of the Cheetah Club onto the Boardwalk in 1968, and the legendary folk guitarist and inspiration for Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man,” Bruce Langhorne lead parades to helped Katrina victims with his parades in 2005. McLuhan hoicked up the medium of the parade itself (the spectacle) and questioned the significance of the content of the procession. Marshall probed electric technology shifting society from the visual, fragmented, and linear, back to an acoustic, tribalized, and simultaneous, “audile-tactile” world.

Venice Beach Mardi Gras at Surfside Venice. Photo by VenicePaparazzi.com

He viewed “negative” space not as empty background, but as a critical, active component of art and perception—often referring to it as the “interval” or “ground”. The “resonant interval” is the space between elements. It is what defines the relationship and creates movement, much like how the dark space between film frames creates motion pictures. He probed the Renaissance invention of linear perspective (“the vanishing point”) as a 3D, “enclosed” space that forced a detached, static viewpoint on the spectator. “Negative” space is a field of interaction, not a void. In the paintings of M.C. Escher, the negative space is so well-defined that it can be mistaken for the positive space, a phenomenon known as figure-ground reversal.

I thank Keith Nightenhelser for recommending the artist Ken Gonzales-Day, whose photographs of lynching sites document the absences and empty spaces that are emblematic of the forgotten history of lynching in the West. Drawing on newspaper articles, periodicals, court records, historical photographs, and souvenir postcards, he attempts reconstruct the circumstances surrounding the lynchings that had occurred in the spaces he was photographing. The result is an unprecedented textual and visual record of a largely unacknowledged manifestation of racial violence in the United States. https://kengonzalesday.com/ Gonzales-Day adds the victims’ names to the titles, along with the dates and locations of their deaths. In this way, his image still honors the memory of the victims. It is almost as if his photographs have respectfully taken down and properly buried the bodies, while exposing the crowds to the viewers’ gaze. https://smarthistory.org/ken-gonzales-day-erased-lynching-series/

Modern thinkers investigated the shrouded psyche effects, or “hidden variables” of “space” explorations. Albert Einstein dismissed quantum entanglement as “spooky action at a distance” asserting that it violated the principles of locality and relativistic speed limits in space. Heidegger claimed that space is not merely an abstract, mathematical, or physical container, but is determined by “place” and human concern. Michael Pollan argues that tech companies are shrinking the “space in which spontaneous thought can occur” by monetizing our attention, effectively restricting our mental space. Alan Watts describes “space” in relation to the “Net of Jewels” (derived from Mahayana Buddhism) as extending infinitely in all directions, representing the entire cosmos. “Space” is not “nothingness,” but as the fundamental, empty, and luminous background in which all forms (the jewels) exist and mirror one another.

Sun Ra influenced P-Funk. George Clinton’s lyrics, particularly in “Funkentelechy,” create a “safe space” by fostering a liberating, non-judgmental, and, self-affirming environment through funk. The song highlights, “Funk is a non-profit organization” because it not only moves, it removes. “It is responsive to your mood.” Music serves as an emotional sanctuary for mental liberation. “Free Your Mind… and Your Ass Will Follow.” Expand Sun Ra’s philosophy that reality is fluid and rhythmic. Alter space-age consciousness and transport Venice into a higher dimension. Create a self-determined future (“alter-destiny”). Consider flipping “Space is the place” into “Venice is the safe space for everybody’s place.”

Special Thanks to ERIC AHLBERG. This essay is dedicated to Michael Shields & Greg Sanford, who passed recently.

Rudolf Steiner wrote: “After death, nothing dramatic happens in the way people imagine. No instant reward. No theatrical judgment. First, you see your life; all of it — spread out before you. Not as nostalgia. Not as emotion. Just fact. Clear. Undeniable. Then something far more uncomfortable begins. You live it again. Backwards. But this time, you don’t just experience what you felt. You experience what others felt because of you. The joy you gave. The harm you caused. The indifference. The love. Not as punishment. As understanding. Only after this purification does the soul enter what Steiner calls Devachan; not a fantasy heaven, but a world of living archetypes. A world where the invisible foundations of reality exist. There, your life is distilled. Every struggle becomes capacity. Every moral effort becomes strength. Every truth you made your own becomes substance. What was event becomes essence. You are not resting there. You are preparing. Preparing the forces that will shape your next existence. Life is not one chance between birth and death. It is a rhythm. Incarnation. Experience. Confrontation. Assimilation. Return. Not a straight line; but a breathing between worlds. And the real question is this: What are you building now that will still matter when the body is gone?”

I welcome your rewording, your feedback and feed forward. Thank you, Gerry Fialka pfsuzy@aol.com Laughtears.com upcoming events – Join in:

*** *** FRIDAY, MAY15 from 3 to 4:30pm – Gerry Fialka hosts Venice Culture Salons (VCS#21) at Venice Heritage Museum, 1234 Pacific Ave – Fun, fiery, interactive discussions about our Beachtown. Free admission. Bring your stories. Delve deep into Venice music, film, art, literature & current events. Live oral history. Featuring: “Venice AI as IA” covering Damon Packard’s Venice film and Orson Welles. With guest RICHARD MODIANO.

******SAT May 16 David Lucky at Brad Kay house concert 6pm-dinner, 7pm “Hollywood Hidden Gem”

*** Sat, May 23, It’s All Write Ma – Dylan Salon from 2-4pm, free admission, at Pour Vida Art & Plant House, 2124 Lincoln Blvd, Venice 90291 – live music (unplugged) and discussion — Could it be RobbMe Zimmer as Noel Coward? and/or: “I don’t like propaganda in the theater unless it is disguised so brilliantly that the audience mistakes it for entertainment.” When asked “Are you a poet?” Bob responded “I’m a trapeze artist.” Bob says: “Don’t ever tell anyone everything you know.” and ““I didn’t create Bob Dylan. Bob Dylan has always been here.” “Are you going to play yourself?” Bob: “No, I am gonna play my mother.” TANGLED Up in EVERYawareNESS.

*** Sun, June 14, Bloomsday Psychedelia at Beyond Baroque, free, 6pm live readings, film, music, dance Psychedelic Art Party w/ James Joyce Multi-Verse Finnegans Wake & Bloomsday, with many special guests including Zappa Glee Club – Frank Zappa choir. VISIT Eric Ahlberg’s YouTube channel

*** SAT June 27 at 3:30pm, Venice Jazz Salon free at The Venice Library – Gerry Fialka & Brad Kay delve deep into the untold stories Venice’s jazz roots

*** Sat, July 18, The 19th ANNUAL LIT SHOW with SUZY WILLIAMS & BRAD KAY at Beyond Baroque, 681 Venice Blvd, 7pm Celebrate song and literature

***SAT Aug 29 Celebrate SPONTO Art Gallery at Venice Public Library, 330pm FREE

*** Sun, Nov8 at 6pm-live music, 7pm-films at Beyond Baroque – Music Films with Mark Cantor: “I’ve Just Gotta See It But It Ain’t On YouTube Blues”

*** Sun, Nov 15, PXL THIS 36 Toy Camera Film Festival ONLINE Special thanks: Technical advisor & archivist Sam R. Wilson http://www.pxl2k.com Free Electronic Folk Art “The most audacious film festival ever” see it on Youtube for free

***EVERY FIRST TUESDAY of EVERY MONTH is Marshall McLuhan-FINNEGANS WAKE Reading Club online “where the hand of man never set foot.***Check Gerry Fialka’s “I’m probably wrong about everything” Podcast on Youtube- interviews with MUSIC, ART, LIT, FILM, POETRY, MEDIA, ACTIVISTS, SCIENCE, NEW KNOWLEDGE, INFLUENCERS & amazing people world-wide CHECK OUT NY Times best seller author/comedian John Fugelsang, Code Pink’s Medea Benjamin, Frank Zappa people, and more

***Every SUN (except 2nd sundays) from noon – 4:30pm Brad Kay jazz merriment at Unurban 3301 Pico Blvd with Suzy Williams, Mews Small, Ginger Smith, Flo Laurence and more. FREE JAZZ CABARET FOLK POPULAR MUSIC Live!!! https://sundaysongbirds.com/ Gerry Fialka pfsuzy@aol.com 310-306-7330 Tune in, Turn Around, and Drop by

“`