Arts & Events

It has been suggested that we exist in one of multiple universes. The Berkeley edition we seem to share is all too real, where civic passions often meet like a rubbing of sandpapers instead of cosmic inter-dimensionality.

Insight to a parallel world so similar as to be preferable at times has been brought to us, through which the lower campus of UC is revealed to be a golf course. These glimpses have reached us through the monthly foldover known as Pepper Spray Times. Dismissed (even by its editor) as a satire to spare us the truth of an alternate existence, its continuous and independent coverage of the otherworldly familiar since 1995 makes it the dean of all city news periodicals!

PST has provided coverage from the beyond of the local real-world outrages in a breezy to-the-point style reminiscent of old Shopping News fillers and progressive tabloids. When gathered in the new and complete two-volume collection Pepper Spray Paradise, however, we come to see these revelations not so much as porch-flier prose as Biblical writ. 

Check it out! Volume 1 is heftier than its second-testament continuation; both come in fitting desert sand covers. Even Jesus Himself has consented to spot interviews, although He was uncharacteristically grouchy after being named a UC regent. Like the famous original that answers all doubt, recipes must be hunted. Unlike it, humor is the manna of nutrition for the endurance needed to cope with this universe, one centered in a self-absorbed university town. Instead of prophets, the PST has depended upon a long series of inspired journalists, hired by founding editor Grace Underpressure—in our world, Carol Denney—staying just long enough to pad their resumes, and bearing double-entendre names that would make for a great phonebook listing, which I hope in their world they still have. Commandments—inflated to 11 or more—are softened into lists of advice or suggestions by a preternatural Dear Abby, aided by knows-all Lena Deeter ’s inviolable guidance. (Leena was a genuine treasure.) Several modern-day monks have illuminated the truth beneath truth in comic strips, but doctored photos are also used. 

There is more good news! These testaments are supplemented by two volumes bound in a forgiving robin’s-egg blue. As a digest of the Volumes 1 and 2, Pepper Spray Picnic could prove an ideal compendium for home-schooling or bedside perusal. Since wisdom on coping in the world of Berkeley is to be found on any page, it may also be seen as a scout guide. Picnic could even prove to be ideal for evangelizing, should a new continent be discovered. As to the use of the spray on ants, that remains an ultimate mystery. 

Its thin companion, Coronavirus Cartoon Chronicles, is something of an apocrypha. Divined over the last year’s pestilential storm, this is a collection of gesturally-drawn strips that ran in the PST and should have run in a major daily; I’d like to see them in my Saturday Chronicle, to off-set its anti-Berkeley editorials. 

PST readers know that the multi-talented Carol has a laser-beam sincerity which she delivers month after year with terrific humor and endless creativity, not to mention her contacts which don’t speak in this world but do in hers. But as with the great intent beneath the tender parables of Jesus, thunder lays beneath the levity. As she’s said, in the masthead yet, satire is serious business. It may be perverse to say that, next to voting, the protected right to ridicule power is the most precious of all—so long as we have it. Laughter is the lever that lets the steam out, the gas escape; satire specifies it. 

As it’s been with the Holy Book (of your choice), these compendia bear meaning, lessons and guidance for our time and especially place, and no salesman will call. If you haven’t already, wouldn’t this be a great time to bring satire-as-revelation into your life? Easter is just around the corner. We may get another visit, or we may not. Meanwhile, buy a set. Put them on that canted mahogany stand used for the family dictionary ..