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The Life & Times of Doug Knott

1943

FLORIDA

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Early Life

born December 18, 1943

1957- 1962

POMFRET CT

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Pomfret Prep School

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1962-66

NEW HAVEN CT

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Yale College

BA English

1964

ASIA

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Travel 

deckhand on a trans-Pacific Swedish freighter in Japan followed by a year traveling through Asia

1965

SELMA AL

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March with Martin Luther King Jr.

and documenting with photographs

1966-70

CAMBRIDGE MA

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Harvard Law School

Law Degree

1967-68

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL

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A year of study and travel abroad

Rotary Scholarship

1972

BAY AREA

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Lawyer

private practice

1985-1987

LOS ANGELES CA

Lhasa Club LA

Doug Knott Presents

host of cult variety show at the infamous Lhasa Club

1985-1988 + 1992

LOS ANGELES CA

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The Lost Tribe

legendary pre-SLAM performance poetry troupe

1989-2009

LOS ANGELES CA

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The Carma Bums

yet another legendary performance poetry troupe

2001

LOS ANGELES CA

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met Janet Sager

true love

2013

SANTA MONICA CA

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Last of the Knotts

a one man comi-tragedy

November 22, 2014

LOS ANGELES CA

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Janet and Doug tie the Knott

soulmates

2013 -2019

VENICE CA

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Beyond Baroque Literary | Arts Center

president of the Board of Trustees

2016

YALE

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Naked Lunch, The Musical

performed during the "Yale ’66 at 50" anniversary

2018

LOS ANGELES CA

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Bad Day

short film by Modi Frank and Exene Cervenka

2018

LOS ANGELES CA

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Sunset Strip Self Improvement Affirmations

directed by Joseph Culp

2016-2022

LOS ANGELES + OJAI CA

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Dual cities

Doug & Janet divided time between homes in LA and Ojai

December 23, 2022

OJAI CA

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Left his body and this earthplane

Zen Alter : 49th Day Buddhist Memorial Rite

TIMELINE
saguaro
1943-2022
2020  |  David Starkey interviews Doug about his journey

Creative Community 2.0 is a collaboration with ECTV and TVSB. ECTV is cooperative product between El Camino High School at Ventura College, Ventura Unified School District and CAPS Media.

Image by Julissa Santana

family album

Taken at Yale in June 1963 of Doug and Mike Lewis who traveled all over Europe that summer

A brief autobiography

Doug Knott with cactus

“Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.”

~ W.B. Yeats

J. Douglas Knott in his own words | written 2016 for Yale ’66 at 50, Vol. II

     I loved Yale. It inspired my life of curiosity and experiment and being a self-educating person. Having lived on the edge most of my adult life, I feel grateful to be alive, for my wife Janet, and many loving friends.

     I came to California in 1972, on the wave of the sixties’ counterculture. The zeitgeist of enthusiasm for self-knowledge and self-expression blew in during 1965-66, our final year at Yale. Inspired by Al Lowenstein, I marched at Selma. I took a year off in ’64 to hitchhike around the world, via a trans-Pacific job on a Swedish freighter. Somehow, I made it through Yale and was accepted at Harvard Law School. During the middle of law school (1967-68) I received a Rotary scholarship for a year of study in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

     With a little help from psychedelic friends back at Harvard, an experimental life became irrepressible. I made the pilgrimage to Woodstock and knew Richard Alpert who became Ram Das. After graduating with my law degree, I lived a hippie life in Vermont and New Mexico before migrating to Berkeley in ’72 and entered a Tibetan Buddhist monastery for six months. My spiritual teacher encouraged me to “do only good” as a new age lawyer practicing in a storefront in Berkeley, and later in Marin. I started playing rock ‘n roll but lacking musical chops, was drawn to the spoken word and poetry movement that emerged during the eighties in the post-punk art world in Los Angeles. I have been perched on the edge of Mt. Hollywood ever since.

     I produced and hosted a hit cult variety show with myriad performers of the local underground during the mid-1980s in LA, while practicing law just enough to pay the bills. My claim to fame is that my bartender went on to be the Terminator in Terminator 2. I was a member of a five-man poetry ensemble called The Lost Tribe, which evolved into the Carma Bums, and we did several West Coast tours. In the 1990s, I created poetry videos, including Psychic Defense Training for Ex-Lovers, which played on broadcast TV.

     Now in my 70s, I am finally an artist, albeit late-blooming. Having broken free from living in a reverse-world as an “eternal boy,” I got married last year for the first time to Janet after living together for 13 years. Our relationship helped me to heal from the effects of my childhood growing up with a secretly abusive alcoholic father who was a judge and pillar of the community.

     After three decades of writing poetry and fiction, I wrote a one-man theatrical stage show, Last of the Knotts, and have been performing it for the past four years in various cities including LA, NYC, Winnipeg, and San Francisco. I have served as the board president of the literary foundation, Beyond Baroque, for the past three years. After some hard traveling on a twisted road, this poet-performer-mystic-playwright, disguised as a lawyer, has finally found a soft landing. Risking humiliation on stage is a small cost for doing what I love. I hope to be able to continue to tend my creative fires into the great void.  •••

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Doug served as President of the Board of Trustees of Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Foundation from 2013-2019.

Beyond Baroque