WATERFALL ROAD

CATERPILLAR BIRDWATCHER

2012-02-11T13:17:00.000-05:00

caterpillar in the window

snowbird and squirrel

Caterpillar reclines on her window seat watching the snowbirds hop about in the half inch of snow that fell an hour or so ago, snowbirds and chickadees looking for seeds on the ground. They are candybars with wings to her. She knows how they taste. She knows how to catch them. Before she was old, lethargic and heavy, she could catch one whenever she went hunting. I watched her bat one in the air that she'd been stalking. It flew over her head about 4 feet above her. She jumped straight up, reached up like she was playing handball and swatted it. She hit a wing and set it to wobbling. The bird caught its equilibrium in a frantic hurry and flew off. I realized she'd done that before, and probably has been more successful than the one time I saw. Like a Maine Coon, she has involuntary twitches of her lips and cheeks, whiskers wiggling, and an involuntary squeak comes out of her mouth. Whenever I hear that squeak, I know Caterpillar is watching a bird. I've seen her at the screen door looking at the squirrel on the other side of the screen, just a few feet away. They looked at each other a long time.

Now that she stays indoors, I am free to feed the birds. When she goes outside, she'll lie still and look like a gray rock, part of her hunting method, sit and wait, looking like a rock. She'll lie there and watch them for a long time, never moving except to squeak and wiggle her whiskers. She has green glow-in-the-dark eyes. She's sitting up now watching them, the occasional short meow, a big yawn. Maine Coons are awfully automatic. They don't seem to have much of a mind for thought. Her brother TarBaby, sleek black cat, could think. He had a brilliant mind for a cat. He had automatic behavior too, but he was able to think about things. Caterpillar is too deep inside her intuitional nature; thought is something her breed evidently needn't do so well. They were the first breed of cats in the New World. They were kept on ships to keep down mice and rats from the grain storage. Maine Coons were good for ships because their fur is so thick their skin doesn't get wet. They're friendly cats too. They can run like a bullet.

One characteristic I've seen in all the Maine Coons I've met, there comes a time in being petted when they've had enough. The moment you feel their discomfort, it's time to stop. One more second and they bite. Caterpillar can't allow herself to bite me, because I've never hurt her. She'll touch her teeth to my hand to let me know if she didn't love me so much she'd be drawing blood. I raised her in the house with her two siblings, both black, TarBaby (m) and Tapo (f). Caterpillar never liked them. She was the biggest and toughest. She ruled. She bullied Tapo all her life. I didn't know what to do about that but to call Caterpillar off when she'd start intimidating her. After TarBaby died, I felt like Tapo died to get away from Caterpillar. She couldn't live with Caterpillar without TarBaby to protect her. She loved TarBaby an awful lot. I feel sorrow for her now that she had to live her entire life with Caterpillar. I didn't realize it was such a burden for her until the end, or that she loved TarBaby so much. Looking back into their lives I can see it. I miss them so much I could cry every day if I let myself.

Now it's just me and Caterpillar. I can't know Caterpillar as well as I knew TarBaby or Tapo, who had different minds from Caterpillar's. Caterpillar stayed off to herself much of the time. She'd come around to me seeking affection every 3 or 4 days, leaving me to TarBaby and Tapo the rest of the time. Since they're gone, we're together all the time I'm at home. She sleeps in the same room I sleep in now. We had to learn to communicate. I had not noticed that I communicated very little with Caterpillar to not at all. I see now her mind was far away because the other 2 cats were between her and me. I've taught her how TarBaby communicated with me, showing me what he wanted. When he wanted out, he'd get my attention, then walk to the door. TarBaby's method of asking to be let in would be one meow. Caterpillar asks to be let in by plucking the screen with a claw. Tapo's way was to stand up at the window and scratch on the glass until I noticed her eyes that were calling me.

Caterpillar was the nurturer after the mother died when they were 2 weeks old, the day their eyes opened. Caterpillar kept them clean. She started liking it so much she kept their little rear ends raw and she started getting woozy from so little nutrition. Then it was time for the kittens to take care of themselves and Caterpillar recovered from her wooziness. The nurturer in her was as automatic as wiggling her whiskers when she sees birds. Now that we're together, we are communicating very well. I talk to her, she understands my meaning. When she wants to look outside, but not go outside, I'll hold the door open for her to look until she's satisfied. When I want to close the door, I'll touch the tip of her fur with the door, not even a nudge, to tell her it's time to decide. If she wants to go out, she'll go, and if she' wants to stay in, she'll turn around and walk back in. We have a good mutual respect going. I only treat her with respect and she only treats me with respect. It's always been that way with us. It's not a matter of will. It's the love between us that makes respectful regard automatic for both of us.

THE FACE FROM OUTER SPACE

2012-02-11T00:35:00.000-05:00

the face

back of head

another view of the face

I might have found a meteorite today. Went out to fill the birdfeeders and found a rock on the trail between the door and the birdfeeder. Round, about the size of a golf ball with dimples sticking out instead of in. It's not a rock from around here. I know Air Bellows rocks. This rock isn't from anywhere near here. The color is not from here. I walk that trail every day, sometimes twice in a day. I'd never seen it before today. I would have seen it. I notice rocks for their beauty. I picked it up, thinking little of it, maybe it rolled down from the road. Later in the day I went out to put more seeds in the feeder and saw the rock. Picked it up, looked at it, thought it oddly interesting, not from around here. But I've brought rocks here from Baja in Mexico, Whitetop mountain. Every time I go out for a walk I come home with a rock that caught my eye. There is a mess of rocks around the house I've picked up. Other people collect figurines. I collect rocks. No special kind of rock, just a shape and color that catches my eye. I see them the original sculpture. Every one uniquely itself, like snowflakes.

I put the rock on a rock pedestal I set up, a square rock about 8" thick, about 18"x18" sitting on a locust stump I set in the ground. On the square rock sits an oval green rock found in the southern part of Baja California. I saw an entire mountain made of these oval green rocks, perfectly smooth, every size from pebble to boulders the size of my house, even bigger. It was like God's wheelbarrow dumped a load of green gravel and made a mountain. I pulled off the road to pick up a rock to bring home in the trunk. It's the size of a small watermelon. I've made a painting of it that is in Atlanta. It's one of my favorites. This rock that evidently fell from the sky seems to have had a crack on it where a piece of it broke off, possibly during the burn of entry. It exposed some of the interior. The inside is a soft adobe red. It has 2 eyes, a face and hair. It's like the external part of the ball suggests hair, the broken off part suggests face with eyes.

Years ago I read in a book about Japanese gardens that a Japanese gardener must be able to see the face on a rock. From then I started looking for the faces. The faces on rocks are like the faces you see in trees. They're not exactly human faces; they are their own faces. Owls have their faces, deer have their faces, cats have their faces, rocks have their faces too. It's one of the reasons I've come to see the rock as a form of consciousness, the slowest of all, slower than the green world, entirely unable to move of its own power. Its only power is its hardness. In contrast to the worm that is totally vulnerable without defenses. Living underground, the worm needs no defenses.

This face looks like a Halloween mask that covers the eyes, like the Lone Ranger mask, though this a desert sand red with two eyes. I've made a few paintings of rock faces. Finding the face on a rock is like finding the face in a tree. Just wait for it and one will appear. I've thought of painting faces I see in trees, just never have done it. That could be a good outdoor project for the summer. This maybe meteorite might have hit the ground near where I found it some time in the night. It wasn't there yesterday. I'd have seen it, like I saw it today. It's a rock I would notice first time seeing it. First thing I see, it's not from around Air Bellows. That catches my eye.

I googled meteorite and found a few like it. It's clean with no dirt on it or dampness from the rain a few days ago. It's as clean as if I'd brushed it with a dry toothbrush. I'll settle that it must be a meteorite. It's a fair chance it fell in the night. Nothing has been by to disturb the small rocks beside the road, none of which look like this rock, anyway. Given that it landed or stopped rolling in the path to the birdfeeder just outside the door tells me it is my rock. That's as good as special delivery. It's from another world. It came from outer space. The face that fell to earth.

MAIN STREET ON A THURSDAY AFTERNOON

2012-02-10T00:42:00.000-05:00

rock mountain

Attempting to make a left turn onto Main St on a Thursday afternoon has become what Friday alone used to be. I had to wait for the car in front of me, which after waiting until he couldn't wait anymore made a right turn instead of the left turn. My turn at the stopsign and I see an endless line toward the courthouse light. A little bit of extra space between two cars. Zoom-zoom, I jumped in the space. I know better than to attempt a left turn onto Main St on Fri. I need to include Thursdays now. It's hard to believe by imagination alone that it takes as long to make a left turn onto Main St from a side street as it takes to make a left turn onto highway 17 from a side street in Myrtle Beach. It's not nearly the same volume of cars, but it takes as long to wait for a hole in both directions of traffic. The way the lights are set, when the line of cars that come from one of the lights to the next light gets by, then the line of cars from the other light starts its long parade. All there is to do is step on it and go for an opening. But every time I go to Winston-Salem, very seldom, I forgive Sparta all the times I've cussed its traffic. Once when friends were visiting from Atlanta, we were in Sparta and I was driving, griping about the traffic. Judy said, "What traffic?" Thank you for that.

Walking by Kermit's barber shop I saw through the glass door no one in the chair. I had the money in my pocket, no waiting, about-face, in the door and in the chair. Kermit has covered his walls with photographs of Sparta in the old days and people from the old days, newspaper articles, like when Bill Monroe played in Sparta, Del Reeves album cover and poster. I like to look at all the pictures every time I'm in there. People bring him pictures. I've taken him two, one of Jr Maxwell & Cleve Andrews jamming together, and one of them with The Little River Boys band, which included Estel Bedsaul and Paul Joines. He had a picture of Ed Atwood with his banjo, Howard Joines with fiddle and Clif Evans with guitar, when they were maybe in their 30s. Somebody gave him a close up photograph of a coiled rattler. It's spooky looking. Picture taken on the Parkway at Mahogany Rock. Kermit is a bluegrass bass player, country guitar player, and every year at the Hillbilly Show he lip-syncs two songs by George Jones, ol Possum. That's his nickname. His eyes are so close together he looks like a possum to country people. There is always somebody in a rural community nicknamed Possum, which grows up into Poss.

From Kermit's I crossed W Whitehead St on the way to see Chris Davis in her shop on the corner. I don't know that I've ever known what she calls it. She'd emailed me earlier asking if it would be all right to put one of my paintings in the window. I was told by somebody who saw it that it was in the window. I'd driven by twice and never noticed. It was the one of Howard Joines playing his fiddle with the chicken singing into his ear while he plays Chicken Reel. I was happy to see I like it. I never know what it's like to see one of my paintings the first time. It takes quite a long time of not seeing one to the point of forgetting it, then when I see it, it's almost like I'd never seen it. The familiarity is gone from it and I can see it more objectively, from afar. That's how I like best to see one of my paintings, the first time after so long I've forgotten it. It's like somebody else's painting then. I don't know what I would think of them if I hadn't painted them. I think I'd like them, but can't be sure.

Chris had a painting of hers from the past in there, three cows on a large field of white. Stunning, truly stunning. She'd just finished a nice piece of furniture that she'd painted in an extraordinarily beautiful way. Chris has single-handedly restored several downtown spaces. The one she's in now, she's done it up before. Completely changed it for this go-round. She can take a space with four walls, ceiling, floor, windows and doors, and transform it into any kind of look or feeling. She specializes in faux finishes. She can make a wall look like it's ancient or futurist. Chris is no stranger to work. She's the hardest working individual I know. She starts at it early in the morning and goes full speed into the night and starts over next morning. She has the work ethic of the old mountain people. Shes a good artist too. She likes painting black and white cows, the dairy variety.

Before the excursion that ended at Chris's, I left the coffee shop where I'd been visiting with Joe Allen Delp. I've taken to really liking and respecting Joe Allen. He tells some good stories of his experiences in another time when Sparta was the shopping center for the local people, the hardware store across the street from the courthouse. In that time, it was all mountain people here. Now the mountain people are rare in Sparta. Everything has changed. Sparta's center of gravity moved from the stoplight by the courthouse down to the stoplight by Hardee's where the shopping centers and parking lots are now. The downtown part of Sparta has no parking except along the street. Joe Allen is of another time. He's like me in that the times have passed him by. The world we both know is past and gone. Like in the song Angel Band, the setting sun is sinking fast, my race is nearly run. Joe Allen is somewhat harshly judged for his drinking habit in the past. No one has ever wondered why he needed inebriation so much. I think he came close to killing himself with it. He's gentle as a rabbit. Joe Allen is good people.

MY PHOTOS AT THE FRONT PORCH

2012-02-09T02:41:00.000-05:00

willard and sandy

Yesterday I spent the day into the night putting 999 photographs from the computer to a dvd. Have about half that many to go. Putting together all the photographs taken at the Front Porch of the Fiddle and Plow series that Scott Freeman and Willard Gayheart put on weekly. 999 times hitting the same three keys on the keyboard. Takes awhile. I'm not somebody who could do something like that every day as my work. It's why I'm not an accountant. I'd rather be mowing hay. I want all the pictures I've taken at the show over the last couple years on dvd, which I'll pass to Scott for his archives to pick pictures he'll want to use for one reason or another, if he wants. I don't want copyright and all that. For me, it was my fun at the time. I enjoyed it so much, this is my form of gratitude. About 135 pictures of Willard, then about the same number of Scott, then about half that many of them making music together. Then pictures of all the guests from beginning to present.

By the end of the experience, I came away with the picture above as one that catches perfectly what I'm looking for in a photograph. I don't want magazine "quality" pictures. They're dead to my eye with their perfectly sharp edges and everything perfect. I don't live in that world. It's not a world anybody lives in. It's a 2D image on a piece of paper. I don't mean to make little of people like Elliot Porter, Annie Leibovitz, Richard Avedon et al, not at all. I'm only looking at what I want of my own photographs, subjectively. This one above was taken with a very slow shutter speed, which usually makes them somewhat fuzzy and does a kind of vaseline lens thing with the light, very subtle, thankfully. Saying slow shutter speed, I don't mean to imply I know camera lingo or want to appear to. I want my photos to have a living sensation about them, which is I want for my paintings too. I like the blur of the right hand striking the guitar strings. I like the slight blur around Willard indicating motion contrasted with the still guitar that has no blur of motion about it, the still point the music flows through. I don't mean to get symbolic about it either. Just following associations.

I like the ceiling light reflected in the glass above Sandy's head. Can't make out the light source. It's like a glow in the nest of her wavy hair, like an aura. The blur around Willard gives me a sense of aura. I like how the light reflects on the rims of his glasses. I like the reflection of the ceiling lights on Sandy's glasses. I especially love how the image of them singing together feels like you can almost hear them, at least hear the emotion in that moment of the song. The very slight blur doesn't alter the lines of their faces, but gives a living sense, almost like the light is coming from them. Brings to mind Robert Bly's book of poems, The Light Around The Body. I picked it up earlier today after not looking at it for almost 40 years. So much has changed since then. I read two of the poems, chosen randomly. Knocked my sox off. I remembered right away how much I loved his writing in my college and post-college years. loved it a very great deal. Then I went to the mountains and my urban interests fell away after the first few years. Back to Willard, that line of white light that outlines him is something like the black line in Japanese painting.

And most important, the photograph caught both their faces such that they look like the people I know, who the image represents. This is how Willard looks while he is singing. This is how Sandy looks when she is singing. I love that the harmony they are singing is visible in the photograph. The credit I have to give largely to chance, my friend chance. The camera has a delay in the push-button of a portion of a second, but long enough that somebody singing into the mic when I push the button will have the head turned to the side, mic ruining a good profile, when it clicks. This means I never get the picture I push the button for. It doesn't work to anticipate the next second's motion, because it never happens as I anticipate. I've learned to get 4 or 5 pictures of the next second after I click the button, because eventually one works. I just keep on clicking, one after the other. The others make good pics, too, with a spontaneous feel about them. I like that feel of spontaneity captured in a still image. It's one of my guiding lights to catch the feel of the spontaneous. This picture above does that for me.

I see them both in motion, not still. I've found, making the videos, that I like to hold the camera allowing for jiggles, the occasional cough, keeping it in motion. The ones made early on that were held as still as I could manage, attempting to be a tripod replacement, bored me immeasurably. They were so still, they were dead. I like to zoom in on one or two musicians and move the camera around the band, showing 1 or 2 at a time, back and forth, following the action. Focusing on the singer, then moving to the instrument taking a break, like when Scott takes off with his mandolin or fiddle. That's another one. I've been looking for the one photo of Scott that captures him like this one above gets Sandy and Willard. My favorite of Scott is one that the camera took the picture just as somebody else's flash went off, brightening him with halogen light, the shadow of his arm and hand on the front of his shirt as he lifted his hand from the strings on the last note. I don't use a flash, but I love this flash, because it was from somewhere else, making a nice shadow contrasting the brilliant light he's bathed in. I think it's my favorite of the Scott pictures. It feels like the electricity of his picking. I don't mean he's plugged-in, but his picking itself is electrical.

These are not pictures I'd put in a competition, because taking a "good" picture is not what I want to do. Per show, I pick one place to station myself, usually in the back so I won't be standing up in front of anybody. I also like to get tops of heads of the audience in the pictures when it's natural. I don't like moving around getting interesting angles, close-ups, arty type things, and I don't like being in the way of people around me. So I stay in back and use the zoom. I don't like using a flash; the light is unnatural. The zoom with slow shutter speed makes its own kind of blur with the light. That's the source of the vaseline lens look. Vaseline lens is too extreme an example, because it is way subtler than that. It's a sense of softness in the light. When I say I like it, love it, it's not because I think it has anything about it seen objectively that is extraordinary. What I like and love is that it has in it what I want one of my photographs to be. Not thinking competitions and prizes and money and fame. I just want to make photographs that accord with my own particular aesthetic sense, which I can't put a name to or a finger on. It just is what it is. I'm not cutting edge. That's for them that want it. I want to live my life as I live here at home and evolve my own aesthetic according to my experience. Found a nice one, too, of Jeanette Williams.

jeanette williams

Nearly all the other pictures of her are facing the bass full-front, and her beside it, an incredible study in curves. They're too much magazine type pictures for my satisfaction. In this one, I see Jeanette and the bass as one. It's not a matter of curves; they're all implied, like the "you" left out of "get me a beer." It's Jeanette bass player one with her bass, it standing there like a big ONE. Her beautiful face glowing light. I like too, how the glow from the slow shutter speed and the minuscule blur of the zoom have put a soft glow of light on her face. She and the bass really are one. She sings while she plays it, uses it to enhance her singing and for expression of emotion. The pictures of her curves standing beside the bass's curves, makes a better picture. I like this one for the symbolism in it, mainly. When she plays the bass and sings, her flow is one with the bass. In this picture it looks like the bass has arms and a head. This is how Johnny, her husband would see her from standing beside her playing his guitar. I snapped this picture when she'd turned it sideways for a moment, turning its vibration toward Scott who was tearing up the song with his mandolin. Jeanette, Johnny and Scott recently recorded a new project to be released this month. I feel so privileged.

TAO TE CHING #53

2012-02-07T22:44:00.000-05:00

by riusuke fukahori

        #53

        The great Way is easy,

         yet people prefer the side paths.

        Be aware when things are out of balance.

        Stay centered within the Tao.

        When rich speculators prosper

        while farmers lose their land;

        when government officials spend money

        on weapons instead of cures;

        when the upper class is extravagant and irresponsible

        while the poor have nowhere to turn --

        all this is robbery and chaos.

        It is not in keeping with the Tao.



                                              ---tr. Stephen Mitchell

XLVI SUPERBOWL SUNDAY

2012-02-06T16:32:00.000-05:00

XLVI sack

The Superbowl of the year happened last night. Went down the mountain to Chad's house in Pine Swamp for a Superbowl party of three, Justin too. "Wings" fresh out of the oven, pizza squares fresh out of the oven, beer fresh out of the refrigerator, big flat-screen tv high on the wall in a corner of the sitting room, Chad's recliner under it. Justin and I sat on the couch in the second row. I'd only been to Chad's once. I've known his grandparents and his mother and a couple handsful of his kin. First met Chad when he was 6. He's one of the best natured people you can be around. Easy to get along with, no rooster games, works in a factory, drives a Tbird, good hunter. He's not somebody to drain your energy when around him. He's just who he is, no major issue, no problem, doesn't need to be up front, unless racing. Chad seems to me to have the nature of a happy kid, though I know his childhood wasn't particularly joyous. When he was 15, he had to tell his mother's abusive second husband that if he hits her ever again, Chad will beat him to death with his bare hands. Evidently, he was convincing. Chad is good people.

Justin I've known since he was 3. His next birthday he'll be 30. Justin had such an upbringing I was afraid he might spend his adult life in prison for patricide, and it almost happened, more than once, came so close Justin shudders now when he thinks about how close it was. Three of us there with patriarchal issues watching a bunch of men kick the shit out of each other on tv, exclamations popped up from us like, Did you see that! He snatched that ball out of the air! How did he do that! We watched the commercials and laughed at how funny they were. My favorite was for a little Chevy, I forget the name, showing a stunt driver flip the car sideways and it land on its wheels. They bungee jumped the car with stunt driver in it. There was a commercial of the Restaurant at the Edge of the Universe visited by Darth Vader. I forget what it was about. The funniest one was a dog named WeGo that ran to get beer on the command, "Here WeGo." Dog trotting back and forth getting beer all the time. Cute, funny looking dog, a very well trained dog. The old art of teaching dogs to do tricks is not dead. I've an idea that in every litter of puppies born in USA over the next few weeks, one (at least) in the litter will be named WeGo, this year's big dog name. And some of them will be trained to fetch beer.

Superbowl Sunday has become something of a holiday in itself, like Thanksgiving and Christmas where the men watch football and the women hang in the kitchen. About a half mile before Chad's house I passed a small house with 6 pickups parked in the yard. The house didn't look big enough to hold 6 guys and a refrigerator, but it must have done it. The game this time was one of the best any of us had seen. It was a tug-of-war between two equal teams. The team that won just happened to be the one that won. Something of a flip of the coin. None of us in the room was really pulling for either of the teams. I asked Justin which he was pulling for. He said, neither one, but the projections he heard said the Giants might get it. Neither Justin nor Chad had any emotional interest in either of these teams. I think Justin's team is the Redskins, and his wife Crystal's team is Baltimore. Neither of those teams was playing, so Justin didn't care who won. I don't know Chad's team, but it wasn't playing either. I don't have any team. At the beginning of a game I automatically pick a team to pull for, for reasons unconscious, though I don't care which one comes out on top.

An example of how I would pick a team to pull for at the beginning of a game: If U of Indiana were playing U of Utah, and I know nothing about either team, nothing at all. I see U of Indiana in a sea of corn, corn to the horizon all the way around. I see U of Utah in a world of beautiful snow-capped mountains, desert light, and I find myself pulling for Utah. The Giants and Patriots. I know nothing about either team except one is from Boston and one New York. That's it. If I had to pick between NY and Boston as a place to go to, I'd pick New York. So I go with the Giants. I don't like the word Patriot, because it's used by scoundrels, plus the atrocity of Patriot's Point at Charleston, SC, and the even greater atrocity of the Patriot Act. My only association with the Giants is Joe Namath from when he was a big star in the 60s. The word giants has only the association for me of big people, like to the birds outside, I'm the giant that lives in the house. Patriot has too many ill associations for me to pull for a team named Patriots. It's not a big deal, like I care about it; it's just the subconscious sequence of associations devoid of logic and reason. Something like a rorschach image, I see two tennis players on the tv, never heard either of their names before. It won't be but half a minute or less that I've picked the one to be my favorite. Like Martina Navratilova. I picked her for her name. Venus Williams I picked for her name. It would be for "reasons" that had nothing to do with either player's ability as a tennis player, only associations that say something about me, like I prefer mountains to infinite cornfields. That's all.

Madonna's half time entertainment was a major multi-million dollar spectacle. Performers always appear so small in the half-time shows, that despite Madonna's attempt to counter that effect and appear larger than life, she still came across small most of the time. The production covered the whole football field, making her stage so big it dwarfed her. Nonetheless, she did it right. She let the world know, all the way around the globe, that Madonna rules. She's in excellent athletic shape, keeping up with the dancers, even leading them, in command. A time in the music when she was feeling it, the flow was with her, the big smile on her face was hers to herself. She was having a happy moment, wanting with all her might to reach that place she needed to for an unforgettable Superbowl halftime show, and she caught it, like the Giant #88 jumped in the air and caught a bullet pass with fingertips--How'd he do that!! I loved how she came onto the scene as Cleopatra, her boat pulled by Roman legions, Cleo on her way to Tony. Madonna is a performer who can do choreographed dance with first rate dancers. At one point, she had 6 black guys dressed in white doing hip-hop acrobatic street dance all around her, Madonna hopping around in stiletto heels so high she was almost dancing ballet, all in black with her Nordic-Italian locks flowing around her shoulders. The Madonna I knew would be there was there, the woman in charge. She put on a show.

Justin's wife, Crystal, stayed home for quality time with her baby, Vada. She's not a woman jealous of Superbowl Sunday with her husband. She respects it as the guy's day out of the year. She likes a day out, herself. And Justin doesn't come in the house kicking a hole in the door, knocking her around and cussing her calling a whore, so drunk she has to calm him down and put him to bed, the best she can. She likes the same kind of thrills that Justin likes. She likes it when he drives really fast. She has a bit of dare devil in her. First time I met her after she married Justin, I said, "You're a brave girl." Turns out she is, indeed, a brave girl. It's not that it was brave of her to marry Justin, which I initially meant, but she has the same kind of bravery about her that Justin has about him. She was happy to have a Sunday evening at home with Vada to play with her baby doll and have some fun together before Monday morning when Crystal is off to work again.

RALPH STANLEY AT FAIRVIEW RURITAN

2012-02-05T17:43:00.000-05:00

dr ralph stanley and the clinch mountain boys

Last night Dr Ralph Stanley and the Clinch Mountain Boys played to a happy audience at Fairview. I picked up my friends Chris at his place and Justin at his. Justin wanted to drive his truck. It was better because the back seat in his truck is more comfortable than the back seat in my car. My car's back seat would be fine if the passenger didn't have legs. Plus, Justin knew a shorter way to Fairview than I did and he drives faster, so we had plenty of time. Neither of them had seen a Ralph Stanley concert, ever. It gives me a special time every time I introduce somebody to a Ralph Stanley concert. This was one of the better of the ones I've seen with him. He didn't play clawhammer banjo this time. His voice was a bit rrugged from a recent cold. He said, "I'm a little hoarse today. I was a little mule yesterday."

The musicianship, as always with the Clinch Mountain Boys, was as good as it gets. Dewey Brown's fiddle and James Allen Shelton's guitar make a good band by themselves. The banjo picker was new. Steve Sparkman left the band a little over a year ago. Like Ralph said of him when he introduced the banjo picker, he thought Steve Sparkman was the best, but this guy is just as good. He wasn't blowing smoke. This guy was an excellent banjo picker. I've looked around at websites and can't find his name. Nathan Stanley, Ralph's grandson, is coming along musically and in stage presence. I've been seeing him with his "papaw" since he was 14. Last night when Ralph was introducing Nathan, he said Nathan had been singing with him since he was 3 months old. I saw him in a video of a 50th year Ralph Stanley weekend bluegrass fest at his place in the early 90s. A little boy of maybe 2 years walked around on the stage sometimes. He was son of Ralph Stanley II, Nathan. Over the last 6 or so years I've seen him grow through his teens, at the beginning a notable mandolin player, now playing rhythm guitar, singing, talking, carrying the show, making it easy for his papaw. At the sales table before and after the show, Nathan sits beside Ralph, assists him, helps him the ways I used to help Jr, an assist now and again to help his loss of memory, and Ralph is in the early phases of frailty.

It was a straight ahead concert, Ralph explaining his voice wasn't acting right, sang as forcefully as I've ever heard him sing and sang more than I remember before. He was bright and alert through the whole time. Toward the end, he mentioned he was getting sleepy, and I don't doubt he was. I saw much in him that was familiar from knowing Jr and taking care of him at that age. Ralph had that same faraway gaze, uncertainty, a sense of powerlessness, vulnerable totally, fear of losing the support that keeps him going, and from what I observed on stage and at the sales table, Nathan makes it possible for papaw to leave the house and do what he has to do. Nathan was remarkably attentive to papaw's every move and spoken word. I noticed he watched Ralph the way I watched Jr, to see a fall coming before it started and to be able stop it before it proceeded any further. Sometimes it would be no more than a firm grip on his elbow to steady him and stop the downward momentum at its beginning, when it's easisest to stop. It would take no more than holding him still a second or two to get his inner gyroscope lined up. I see Nathan will translate for Ralph when somebody says something he doesn't get. He puts it in language Ralph understands and he's got it. I know how Nathan feels when Ralph says, I couldn't make it without you. It makes one all the more attentive.

My friends Todd Smith and his wife JoEllen came to the show. At intermission we got together and they said they were loving it. They are new to the county from Winston-Salem, have a house on the side of a mountain in the Stratford area. I know them through the coffee shop, and suggested they might like a Ralph Stanley concert, for one thing a peephole into the culture of the mountains, and for the good music. I only saw, besides them, about 4 people I knew; 2 of them slightly, and 2 of them not at all, except they go to the music show at Woodlawn on Friday nights. I like the feeling inside the auditorium with a Ralph Stanley audience. It's a feeling of reverence from everyone in the place. A couple hours in heaven where everybody gets along and is happy, in the corner where Ralph Stanley plays.

The show was opened by Heather Berry and Tony Mabe from Walnut Cove. They sing Carter Family songs and other old-time and bluegrass favorites. They were the kind of fundamentalists that take it as their duty to ask people to come forward and get saved, you don't know what's going to happen on your way home tonight. They were good musically, good musicians, sang well, but were boring religiously. Ralph Stanley plays almost half gospel songs in his show, but he doesn't have to make an issue of it. He'll sing a spiritual song with power of feeling that will open your heart by itself, no need to make an altar call. I used the video camera, made video of quite a number of songs, wanting to make a dvd to watch at home. But something was wrong. I don't know what happened, but the video stops every few seconds and won't start for a long time. Oh well. Can't have it all. What a great show it was with Dewey Brown's exquisite fiddling, Shelton's guitar, Ralph Stanley's voice. Music the whole time. Clinch Mountain Boys do make music.

WILLARD GAYHEART AND BOBBY PATTERSON

2012-02-04T01:27:00.001-05:00

willard gayheart

bobby patterson

the audience

many the resident cat

Another evening of stellar music from Woodlawn, Virginia. Willard Gayheart and Bobby Patterson made music and sang good old songs at the Fiddle and Plow Show at Willard's gallery and frame shop, the Front Porch. Bobby Patterson came from the Heritage Record Shoppe next door, brought a bluegrass banjo, old-time banjo, and his #6 Henderson guitar made when Wayne was in high school. Bobby is the mandolin player in the Highlanders, the bluegrass band he's in with Willard. They've made music together over 40 years. They're musical partners like Willard and Scott are musical partners of about 25 years. Willard is held very highly by traditional musicians all over the region. He thinks he's nothing at all, but when others talk about Willard, you hear about a man who is such a good rhythm guitarist that musicians love making music with Willard. Bobby too. I came to realize tonight that they are now the old generation of the great musicians in the region. They are now what Luther Davis and Tommy Jarrell once were, the great old master musicians of the region.

It was an audience of 9 tonight, but that didn't slow anything down. A father and son were visiting from Arlington, Virginia, where the boy is doing a school project of the Crooked Road phenomenon,

highway 58. They'd been to a few other events around and showed up for Willard and Bobby. I filled them in at the beginning that these are important characters in the tradition. The magazine Old-Time Herald was started in Bobby Patterson's basement. Bobby has recorded quite a number of SW Virginia old-time and bluegrass musicians, some truly classic albums among them, The Shady Mtn Ramblers (Whit Sizemore, fiddle), Whitetop Mtn Band (Thornton Spencer, fiddle / Albert Hash before him), Art Wooten's bluegrass album in his later years, fiddler Otis Burris, and selections from Galax fiddlers convention every year for quite a lot of years. Bobby is a busy man. Bobby's work is the musical heritage of SW Virginia. First time I met him, I told him I believed him to be the most important man in SW Virginia. I still mean it. He's been at the heart of Galax music all his life. His papa was fiddler John Patterson.

Bobby and Willard also play at the Blue Ridge Music Center through the summer months on Tuesday afternoons for a few hours. Willard plays there on Thursdays with Scott. It's an open space outdoors with a roof. It's music that gets made when Willard and Bobby get together. They do some good picking, but it's all in service to the music. The good picking is not about itself, not saying look how good I can play a guitar, not saying that at all. It's about making music first. That's the thing about mountain music: it's music first. They never do any flourishes to show off how good they are. These are masters of their instruments and understatement is their style. When they sing, the words are in service to the song. It's not about how well they can sing. It's about delivering the words in the song. Good mountain singing can seem expressionless to an ear new to it. Like Sara Carter's singing was a nearly deadpan delivery of the words, but she told the words from the heart and they touch the heart of the listener as if she were emoting like Janis Joplin, and all the better because she's not. From the heart is the key to mountain music. Played from the heart in the musician, it touches the heart in the listener. Therein, is the art in mountain music.

Throughout the show, sitting there listening to their music, their talk between songs, I felt awe the entire time. I was in the presence of two bluegrass masters of the Galax music world in the Central Blue Ridge. I'd like to write a biography of Willard. I feel like his story needs telling. Bobby too. Both are carriers of the tradition through their time on earth. Both their lives have been devoted to the music of SW Virginia. They are both major figures in the evolution of the traditional music of SW Virginia. I am honestly in awe of both of them as human beings. Of people I know, I have always felt comfortable in the company of both of them. They don't play rooster games at all. They don't play any games. They'd rather be making music. One of the feelings I feel in the presence of both men is absence of judgment. I very clearly never have a feeling of being judged by either one of them in all the times I've been around them. They're people who don't drain your energy. They both have a clarity of spirit about them. Both are lovers of God. I'm grateful for the opportunity to know them, each of them and both.

First time I met Bobby Patterson, I felt the awe that I might feel meeting Ralph Stanley, somebody really important. I'd known of Bobby Patterson several years before I met him. I especially knew him as guitar player with Tommy Jarrell and Kyle Creed on the old-time album, June Apple. I knew him as his role in the music of SW Virginia, recording so many good bands that otherwise might not have recorded, and he seemed so small and humble when I met him. He was a giant in my imagination. Bobby is not important to a lot of people's ideas about what's important, but in my own personal notion of what's important, Bobby is up there among the most important. What I respect in Bobby after getting to know him is his character. Willard, his character too. Like when I watch Scott Freeman and Steve Lewis make music, both are master musicians I respect as human beings as well. It's the same kind of respect I have for Willard and Bobby, their humanity, in the best possible meaning of that multi-faceted word.

We had a visitor tonight, David Williams, once with the Red Clay Ramblers. Bobby and Willard asked him to come up and sing a song he'd written about the furniture factories in NC going away, in reference to a film he'd been involved in making, a documentary, WITH THESE HANDS. It can be streamed at http://www.folkstreams.net/ . Looks like an interesting site. I could spend a lot of time watching documentaries there. I look forward to seeing With These Hands. Evidently, it covers the social consequences of furniture factories leaving North Carolina and Virginia for Asia. He did some respectable picking and sang a good song.

Scott Freeman was in Nashville with Jeanette and Johnny Williams over their new album, the 3 of them, a bluegrass spgbma awards night.

JOAN RIVERS THE MOVIE

2012-02-02T16:55:00.000-05:00

joan rivers

Just now finished seeing a documentary, JOAN RIVERS: A Piece Of Work. She had me laughing out loud with her quips about living everyday life. She is 75 and getting old is one of her comic themes in this time of her life. She has some good and valid observations, "Aging is the one mountain you can't overcome. It's a youth society; you're too old, you're too old, you're too old." It's an observation you have to be there to feel its meaning. In her case, a performer, it's a very big deal getting old. For me, it's a new experience, a new way of seeing the world around me, a new way of interacting with others, and quite a few surprises. It's that for Joan Rivers too, and she uses it for comedy, like she uses her facelifts for comedy. Perhaps, most interesting for me was that she had to re-invent her persona so many times to keep a life-long career going. She said she likes living in luxury, doesn't want to retire and start watching a budget. She has to keep her career going to keep the life she wants going.

I've never paid much attention to her. She was part of the television package in my mind. Like I didn't know before I saw an interview with Ingmar Bergman that he was also a director at the Stockholm theater, I didn't know there was a whole lot to Joan Rivers and her comedy. The best of Joan Rivers is in her stage performances more than it is in television. Too many self-editing restrictions in television, the same restrictions as in political correctness, the origin of political correctness, so much that PC means nothing more than I-watch-tv. Joan's career is entertaining people who watch tv. She's good at self-editing and seeming spontaneous. She kept me laughing. I wanted my friend Pat to be watching it with me so we could laugh at the same things, so she could be satisfied I'm seeing it and I could be satisfied she's seeing it, each one of us knowing the other's enjoyment. For us to see this film together would be a shared hour and a half of real communication, in a sense, dreaming the same dream, laughing at the same jokes.

I believe this film was made over a period of one year with flashbacks to the past from time to time. I liked the juxtaposition of seeing her at home, in the limo, in everyday life, then seeing her on stage. All the time she's not on stage, she's talking about it and thinking about it. She said the first time she was on a stage, she thought, "This is where I belong." She said, "The only time I'm truly, truly happy is when I'm on a stage." She talked more than once about being born to the stage, the same as being born into a role. I think it's what we call talent. She tells of it the same as not having a choice. In her own word, she's a performer. It's an art form like painting, writing, directing, acting, singing, making music. And I appreciate Joan Rivers, after seeing this film, an artist. For my aesthetic appreciation, it's the same as a documentary of artist Larry Rivers. In myself, I can see that every time I approach a canvas with brush, anywhere along the progression of a painting, I feel a minor version of stage fright, fear that I'll make something terrible with no life in it. A friend, who is a university professor, goes into every class with stage fright. The classroom is his art form. Not his only art form, but an art form.

I'd say the difference between an artist banjo picker and somebody who just likes to play is the drive to make each time you play a given tune better than any time before, polishing, exploring, seeing what can be done with a given run of notes; how it sounds, how it feels, how it moves, what colors it makes, how it resonates. Art amounts to doing anything you do well, paying attention well, doing it with more skill each time. My friend Jr Maxwell was an artist tractor mechanic. He got all the tractors in NW North Carolina none of the other tractor mechanics could fix. He was intuitional about it. If he couldn't find a part, he could make one. I recall a time after Jr couldn't do the physical work anymore, somebody he knew was trying to figure out why his backhoe motor didn't have any power. He told Jr the problem. Jr said, It's the distributor. No it's not! It's not the distributor! He went on and took various parts of the motor apart and put them back together again, went back to Jr a couple weeks later saying, It was the distributor.

Going by this definition of what constitutes an artist, or art, as somebody who works at improving what he does, tries new approaches, polishes, never gets bored, when somebody asks me to paint the same painting again, I say, I'm not a factory. I could do the same subject again, but not a copy. It wouldn't have the freshness of discovery the original carries. My friend, Willard Gayheart, who makes pencil drawings of mountain people, contemporary mountain people, plays rhythm guitar, sings, writes songs, says he is not an artist. Maybe, looking at it from some high on an ivory tower definition of Art, but I believe definitions of art have changed and he didn't know about it. I've an idea that Willard's definition of art is something out there, beyond, unreachable but by a few, and he's not one of the few. Willard by day works on his drawings and by night plays his Henderson guitar. He's among the most humble people I've ever known. Jr Maxwell had a similar humility. These are two people I take for great artists and they don't know what they do has anything to do with art.

I'm recalling the first time I showed Jr one of my paintings, one of him playing his banjo. He suddenly shrunk from me, intimidated. I didn't want that to happen. He said, "How did you learn to do that?" I said, "Same way you learned how to pick a banjer, figured it out." It was the right thing to say. He got it. He wanted to play a banjer, he figured it out. I wanted to paint pictures, I figured it out. I was happy for that save. I did not want a man I respected as I did Jr intimidated by me. He had no reason to be intimidated. Lord have mercy, I was the one to be intimidated by him. He saw himself a farmer and mechanic who played a banjo on weekends. I saw him an artist, an advanced, mature artist. I couldn't tell him this. It was too abstract for his way of thinking. He thought of an artist making pictures like I do. My definition of artist includes bluegrass banjo picking, tractor mechanicking, welding. I saw Jr an artist who happened to be a farmer and mechanic, and a picker.

Joan Rivers said in summary of herself, "I am a performer. That is what I am. That's it." Well said. That's what she is. She's a comedian and an actress, a performer. I came away from it with respect for Joan Rivers as artist, same as I came away from Madonna's film, Truth Or Dare, with respect for her as an artist. And Gina Gershon's role in Show Girls gave me a similar respect for her as artist. I was glad for the insight into Joan Rivers as artist instead of just tv personality. I had no idea what she was about, pretty much equated her with Phyllis Diller, another one I didn't know much about. I feel like I've watched a documentary of an artist's life, same as if it were Elaine deKooning, Larry Rivers, Helen Frankenthaler, somebody who's life has been about making art.

NO TO POLITICAL CORRECTNESS

2012-02-01T20:53:00.001-05:00

barbie by andy warhol

     I find television very educational.
     When somebody turns it on, I pick
     up a book and go to another room.
                           --Groucho Marx

It's late January, early February, the temperature is hitting 60. Weekly rain instead of snow. Scientists are saying global warming is a fact, like evolution is a fact. It's been common knowledge since the 70s, then the Reagan Revolution denied global warming and evolution as policy, like it's a matter of opinion, and now people tiptoe around those words like editing profanity in front of a preacher. Republicans don't approve of global warming, evolution, what have you, like Baptists don't approve of certain words and are quick to tell it. People who know these slow processes are the case prefer to stay out of shouting matches with the ignorant over the obvious. When a liberal parrot I know remarks about how wonderful the weather is, I like to say, "Bring it on, global warming." Faces fall making the transition from unconscious to conscious, "Don't say that."

I'm too old to be around adherents to Political Correctness. I refuse to be a robot or to talk like one. I suppose it's a fashion like tshirts that say Abercrombie. It gets more and more interesting observing American culture that changes from generation to generation. The fashion of the New leads us through the changes like it's all about fashion, keeping up with the latest. Don't want to be left behind. It's like a school of fish that swims this way, then that way, all of them changing at once. Generation gap first came out in the open along about the Sixties when it was discovered since the 50s that pop culture was changing so fast the belief systems change from one 10-year generation to the next. Political Correctness came in as a belief system since I was beyond school age, out of touch with the newest, the latest, the cool. After I had passed my own age of conformity and was well into my own age of non-conformity, I see PC a generational conformity issue that other people adhere to. I hear the young define themselves "very liberal," and I wonder what that means. Very conformist? Willing to believe anything to be cool? In this time of change, cool is the guiding light.

I used to think I could get along with any nationality, any generation without knowing the in-words and phrases that characterize one member of generational belief system. Mine was to crawl under the desk in case of atomic bomb. Long hair on men is a sign of a certain generational belief system. Men with button-down collars signal a certain belief system. Women with hairy legs signal a certain belief system, same as women with smooth legs signal a belief system. In my freshman algebra class was a contestant for Miss South Carolina. She spent the classes looking at herself in her compact mirror. Her appearance bespoke a certain belief system. Only the talking heads that worked at the tv stations had that clean a countenance, like children dressed up for church. By now, I don't believe any more that I can get along with any kind of people and different particular people. It's not that it's not possible, but that everybody takes their own culture, their own language, their own belief system to be the apex of reality. That puts a stop to communication with somebody before it starts.

The biggest gap I have with everyone else is that I stopped watching television in 1965. Since that time, television has become American culture. I am on the outside of that culture, unplugged. Right there says I am of a different belief system from everyone around me. I don't want Television-Think for myself. I don't want television in my mind. I'm talking about commercial television. Videos of films are the same, to me, as going to a theater. It's not full of subliminal suggestions that I spend money on this, that and the other that I don't want. A film that is a good work of art does not fill my head with notions that I need things I can't afford, that who I am is not good enough--only what I am matters, and it not much, because I'm not on tv. As a result of living my adult life without television, I've become quite different from the people around me. I'm definitely not cool. Have never been cool, though there was a time in the life I could put on a cool veneer for a short time, but not any more. Don't want to any more.

I'm coming into the place where I understand why older people I've known have been so withdrawn from social activities, unless to go to a Ralph Stanley concert. I've come to the place I only have a short time left, and prefer to spend the social time with my friends, people I care most about, who care about me. I don't see any point being around people I know I cannot trust. And I sure don't want to waste time with people who judge me for not adhering to the codes of political correctness. I don't care that they judge me. The problem is, they bore me. I've become the old turd of the county. I could hope for no better position. It's time for me to stay at home more and spend my social time with my friends, instead of being judged for absence of political correctness. There is a very great deal in this world I can live without, and political correctness is near the top of the list.

WATCHING THE STREAK GO BY

2012-01-31T23:25:00.000-05:00

entropy

This morning on the news I heard a radio journalist say in reference to the Syrian government killing so many protesters, "Governments have a responsibility to take care of their people." A seed of NewThink. I've never heard anybody say that before today. He could get a new Commie scare going talking too much of that. He certainly did not get that idea from the USGovernment. No. I'm interpreting "take care of" in different ways. The American take care of means overwhelming the world with military might "to protect American citizens." International corporations are American citizens now. Syria is "taking care of" it's citizens. This interpretation amounts to escorting them out of this world, exit-cution. I have to say I am happy that Obama does not feel the need, or at least suppresses it, to compromise himself with hypocrisy by making an issue of the Syrian problem.

I'm finding interior ruminations these days tend to dwell on the nuisance of being expected of. What's expected is not that I spontaneously be myself, ever, but that I conform to the rules of Political Correctness. I'm not going to do it. Same as I'm not going to conform to Limbaugh mind. I'm not interested in being a parrot to any supposed-to way of thinking. It takes too much memorizing, too much self-editing. It's all about insecurity, about being a stranger in a strange land. It's an exercise in walking the Straight and Narrow, the tightwire. Walking the mental tightwire with a neon sign on my forehead flashing "approval." I have walked that wire and walked it. It's a commandment from God misinterpreted and made up by the human mind. The words in the KJV are "strait and narrow." Strait is not straight. The two words are as different in meaning as circle and square, or pour and poor. I don't believe God wants us walking a straight line without any other experience to go with it. The strait is a narrow space of water between two points of land, rough sea on one side, calm harbor on the other. He's saying that we, like ships, have to go through the strait from this rough and rugged indifferent world of waves, inner turmoil, to reach the calm water of the harbor, inner peace.

Strait and narrow is about finding inner peace as a one person at a time thing. Straight, like a ruler, and narrow, like a pencil line, is about doing what you're told. One says God is watching you, meaning watches you like a mother watches her baby in adoration and protection, through eyes of love. The other says God is watching you like a prison guard watching that you don't cross that line. You do and you'll be punished. God the Punisher is the God I was encultured to, like a hawk sitting on a branch watching, waiting for the first chance, then striking with razor talons. The God I have come to see in my adult experience is the God holding me like a baby, protecting me, forgiving me when I wet my diapers. I've heard it said that we humans treat others after our own interpretation of God. It's also said you can tell a lot about how a man treats others by how he treats his dog. Since I see the aspect of God that is unconditionally loving, I am secure within that I have good backup.

I believe I regard others openly and with loving spontaneity. I don't mean Eros loving. I mean Soul loving. It's not something I would try to do. It's just an attitude, how I feel about others. I think what I mean by openly with loving spontaneity is that I like to receive the other as who that person is. Then we bat the ball back and forth over the net like cousins who ride bicycles together. Innocence maybe. That's a tall order, innocence. Opening to innocence. Can I really do that? Dare I expect it of anyone else? It would be, searching inside myself, enlightenment. Obviously, I don't mean those words to those extremes, but with what I'll have to call basic human respect. That's good for what I mean by "openly with loving spontaneity." Basic human respect. I doubt if everybody that knows me would call it that. Interpretation again. I mean I know I do not live the ideal. In everyday life, all kinds of influences are going on every minute.

I don't feel compelled to condemn anybody for anything, given exceptions that prove the rule, preferring a free spontaneous association without games. I like tennis, hitting the ball back and forth over the net, seeing how long we can keep it going. I don't like slamming the ball with all the Chi I can focus into a single point, aiming for the other to miss the ball. I've never seen that fun. When somebody hits the ball to me that way, I watch the streak go by. I haven't touched a tennis racket since high school. Bowling, I'm more fascinated by seeing the pins never fall in the same configuration, ever, watching up and down the lanes how the pins fall differently every time. When I roll the ball, it's a game of chance; see where the ball goes, then see the fall of the pins unique in space and time. I'm more interested in aesthetic considerations, like the patterns of the pins falling, than score numbers or rolling the ball with practiced skill. I'd rather paint a picture with practiced skill. From earliest memories, I've never taken an interest in being competitive. It's why I'm no good in sports. I don't care who wins. Painting, there is plenty of inner motivation.

People I know who see God the Punisher, da Judge, I've noticed expect that I go with God the Punisher too. I've noticed ones who follow God the Punisher think I'm judging them when I'm not. Because I don't talk all the time, I'm expected to be "thinking," the unpardonable American sin, and what else could I be thinking about than judging whoever it is I'm with. I'd so much rather just listen to what somebody is saying, enjoying the music of the voice, enjoying following the other's meaning, their train of thought. I love good avant-garde theater, have come to see it in everyday life. Try watching your windshield as a tv screen to a video game called Driving In The Real World. I see it that everybody has a lot of stories in them, all the stories good ones. I like hearing other people's stories, if it's complaining about waiting at the bank's drive-thru behind somebody with so much work for the teller they should have gone inside. It's a very short short story, a familiar cultural experience with tremendous emotional tension.

THE OLD-TIME OLD-TIMER

2012-01-30T23:46:00.002-05:00

stanley brothers band, art wooton with fiddle

Something is changing inside. I can't see it on the inside, but I see its expression on the outside. I think I'm going through something on the order of what caused me to leave the city for the rural mountain life. I feel a need to withdraw my social relations from people I am not close to, again. It seems I have to do this from time to time. It's not that I dislike certain people, but I find myself talking an awful lot to people who aren't listening. And I hear people talking to me, though it doesn't matter that it's me; it's generic chatter, not individual specific. I came to the mountains in search of solitude. Even bought a new book at the time titled Solitude. It was by somebody who doesn't think like me and we didn't hit it off. I thought his book was filler from start to finish. Or maybe I wasn't ready to receive it. Thoreau's solitude was bogus as his cabin on Walden Pond was a playhouse while he lived in the big house with his mother. He's not a source to go to for help understanding solitude.

First thing I found upon arriving in my Blue Ridge Mountain home was my fantasies of what it would be like were so without substance as not even to be a mist. I saw Walker Evans Appalachian poverty photographs and that was the extent of what I knew of the mountains. That was the same as knowing nothing, or in the minus, less than nothing. By less than nothing, I mean misleading. I have seen bits of Appalachian poverty, but it's mostly out of sight. When it shows up, it's visible. Like this old boy, Kyle Shinault, who lived out at Piney Creek, and probably is still living. He drove an old Chevy Monte Carlo painted black by spray can. He was smelly, dirt tattooed to his hands and face, big gray beard, a cane in each hand. He talked in the old mountain way of emphatic iambic rhythm, and I heard Shakespeare. This is a keyhole peep, I told myself, into how the language was spoken half a millennium ago in London, emphasis on every other syllable. It's watered down, to be sure, by a few centuries this side of the Atlantic. I'd guess the earliest people in these mountains talked with similar emphasis. I've also found the poorest people in the Appalachian chain carry the culture of the old-time ways when everyone else has let them go. You don't see a lot of new cadillacs at a fiddlers convention.

Old Kyle was one I've known who carried the old culture in himself. I call him "old" when he was three years younger than me, looked and talked twenty years older. He was not somebody that people took to. First time I met him, he talked to me for 5 hours straight and I listened to every phrase, every sentence, hearing the music that has gone out of the mountain language. The next time I saw him, I listened to Kyle for 3 hours. I never grew weary. His breath was out of this world, just like in the old days before oral hygiene. When Kyle Shinault walked into the store I had in town, opening the door it was like the door opened to another time. A man from a hundred years ago walked in the door. He played old-time banjo clawhammer style. The tips of his noting fingers had been cut off by a log splitter. He kept rubber tips over the ends of his fingers. Once he got used to it, he could use those rubber nubs about as good as fingertips.

He was one of many I loved to see walk in the door. I've had some really valuable conversations with people in the time of the music store where I sold cds of mountain music. Among the most memorable was a woman whose name I can't recall, in her 80s, telling me of going to the Spartan Theater to hear bluegrass when she was in her teens. Told me of Uncle Dave Macon of Grand Ole Opry, the Stanley Brothers, Bill Monroe, Charlie Monroe, Reno and Smiley, those early bluegrass bands of the late 40s and early 50s that traveled from town to town, up and down these Southern mountains. She became a bluegrass fan for life. Still, in her 80s, she listened to bluegrass with the same love for it she had then. I've listened to old people talk about the time in the mountains before electricity, heard them talk of the old days like it was the Golden Age. I was slow to come to believe that it really was better then. It was a Golden Age. But nobody is going to give up their plumbing and electricity to get the Golden Age back. It wasn't that good.

I had no idea I had moved to a county that was the home county of Bill Monroe's first fiddler, Art Wooten, the man who has the name of the first bluegrass fiddler. Monroe's first appearance on Grand Ole Opry was not long after Monroe hired Art into the band and showed him on the mandolin how he wanted Art to play bluegrass on the fiddle. First song they played was Mule Skinner Blues, January of 1939, marking the official beginning date of bluegrass. An Alleghany County boy. I had no idea of the musical activity in the area. Once I learned the mountains well enough to get a feel for the music, it crept up on me from behind like a sneakin' dog. Old time mountain music bit me good. There was so much I did not know about living in these mountains, I have spent the whole time here studying the culture. Now that I've learned it well enough to get around in it, it's gone. Poof.

OUT OF CONTROL

2012-01-29T14:23:00.001-05:00

stop

The last few days have been a time of remembering my motivation 35 years ago to leave the world by moving to the mountains and working a labor job. I didn't know what "the world" meant, attempting to distinguish between the world and the earth. A meaning of the world is the globe, the earth. Another meaning of the world is the way of human desire. It took a long time to nail that distinction. There is the way of the Tao (or God's Way) and the way of desire, wanting, that is the way of the world. Once I saw that "the world" is the interior world of desire characterized by men-with-guns thriller movies, greed, pride, the list of the 7 deadly sins. I take "the world" to be everything on television, too, especially the evangelists. The world within amounts to the my own wanting, my own desires. If those magnets are not operating inside me, I'll not be drawn to satisfy a desire's craving. If I don't want anything, then I cannot be manipulated. I have somebody in my life right now getting frustrated after finding I am not available for control, on the verge of saying something I'm indifferent to hearing.

I've been through it so many times. I used to be drawn to controlling women. Right off, to be nice, I'd do as told. Then there comes the day control is established and I balk like a mule. When I have to clarify that I'm not looking to be controlled, all kinds of hell breaks loose and I'm hated from that day onward. It became so frustrating to me that I saw a psychotherapist over that question. Of course, it turned out to be Mommie Dearest. What I learned was to keep it up front that I'm out of control, by nature and by will. It has kept me free of having to figure out how to get free of control without too much hard feeling. It can't be done. Once the control starts, that's it. My alternatives are to choose to be controlled the rest of my life or have this woman hate me to her dying day. I pick being hated forever. Being hated isn't all that bad, and it's inevitable in this world. I go with the attitude that half the people I know like me and half do not. I take that for the nature of the social playing field.

It's a good insight into oneself, considering know thyself, the shortest verse in the Bible, to make a list of the people you know hate your guts, and the people you know that like you and are loyal. Just looking at the two lists tells a very great deal about self in the birds-of-a-feather way. When I look at the people I know despise me, then look at the people I think of as my friends, I'm happy with both lists. The ones that dislike me stay away of their own accord and I never have to deal with them. There's no name on the list of ones that despise me I would want to see on the list that likes me. I especially dislike being smiled at and sucked up to by one from the list that I know despises me. There is a mountain saying that when somebody doesn't like you, Be nice to them. It will drive them crazy. I do this sometimes for that reason, just to see it happen. It's not really hypocrisy, just being a bitch, giving the other something new to talk about. Another good old mountain saying, when somebody is talking about you, they're giving somebody else a break from being talked about.

People that talk about you behind your back never say anything good about you. It's to the negative and largely made up. That's the nature of our human existence. I know people who worry over these issues; hear that somebody said something unkind about them and fall into the pit of despair for days. It's the same as the wind blowing. Somebody said you're a real asshole, somebody who knows, and one more person sees you an asshole. Ok. So what. It's an aggressive act to smear somebody's name that invites aggressive action. Several months ago, someone I know who has nothing but contempt for me, called on the telephone from nearby needing jumper cables to get his car going. For the amusement of the asshole within, I went and helped him out. Shook hands, "How you doin, man? Haven't seen you in awhile. You doin all right?" I was all smiles, happy to help him out, a friend I hadn't seen in several years. I think that an aggressive act on my part. I'm sure as hell not going to be timid around him like I have nothing to say.

I found not too long ago somebody I thought of as a friend, given episodes of fickle behavior, has turned on me again. This was the last time. My attitude toward him is he's fucked me over so many times I don't miss a thing. I see him today as someone I used to know. He has a tactlessness that is based in indifference to anything outside his head. Words such as friend and loyalty have no meaning. He could pass a test defining them, but doesn't understand practical application. I find myself in a time of backing away from all but a few I think of as my friends. Again. The names in that circle seldom change, only when somebody new comes in and somebody dies out. It's not like a club. It's just particular individuals I know, most of them a long number of years, all of them people I respect. Respect has been an issue of mine all my life. People I don't respect bore me. Perhaps it goes back to, "I want some respect outta you!" My thought, unspoken, Show me something to respect. The respect I mean is more about character than accomplishments.

A THOUSAND YEARS OF PEACE

2012-01-28T21:41:00.002-05:00

snow flame

Close to the end of January and we still haven't had winter. The temperature gets down to freezing and hovers back and forth over the freezing line; above during the day, below at night. However, I dare not jump to any conclusions, because the big one dumps snow on us in late March, when all the blizzards of the past have occurred. So far we've had a couple of quarter inch snows. We don't mind a mild winter at all, except wondering what lurks ahead. With oil prices ascending to out of reach, it's a good thing the winter is mild for the people on fixed incomes and working class wages, especially the people out of work.

I'm feeling a need within for a change . The change I think is staying home more. Every time I go to town, it costs money. Of course, I only buy things I'll need next week if I don't get it this week. Food, gas, utilities, etc, gobble up everything and not much is left. None, in fact, is left. I've come to where I don't even think of it as money any more. A certain number must come in so a certain number can go out. I'm just the transfer agent, a messenger, passing it from one account to another. It comes and it goes, all in the same day. For me, it's nothing. Yet, because of it I'm able to eat more than I need, drive anywhere I want, within reason, live in my house. It's always been the way. Intake - exhaust. Take the nourishment and pass on the leftover.

In my school years we had a collective notion about civilization as a great thing we held up high. By now, as a result of science, 30 years of greed cut loose, increased communication with every part of the earth, wars for the sake of wars, seeing how wealth tramples poverty, seeing how Christians don't care much for the poor, don't like them, don't want them around, don't want to see them. "Anybody that wants to work can find a job!" So afraid somebody (an African-American in particular) might take advantage of food stamp programs. Somebody poor might get something for nothing. Can't let that happen. It's their own fault they're poor. Time has come, it appears, for karmic debt collection. The pursuit of the American Dream has turned its back absolutely to the poor, pretending to be Christian going to church, smiling all the time like a Zoloft commercial, but when somebody poor walks by, nobody notices the unmentionable buried in denial. The way capitalism is going, the middle class is soon to be the peasant class down there with the working class, those people that wear white socks. I believe the karmic thing is when you got it and you overlook the ones without, you won't have it long.

The USA has been a monument to Self, self-interest held high. It's the western divide of self-first-others-last, in relation to the eastern part, others-first-self-last. I've an idea in this time of rapid change in civilization, one of the major changes occurring is the people of the east taking more interest in self, and people of the west taking more interest in others. Coming into balance. I'm seeing these changes occur collectively around the planet, watching films made in every part of the world, seeing changes they're going through in rural Italy, Istanbul, Bangkok, Beijing, every country, both urban and rural. I'm seeing that all the rest of the world is going through the same changes from generation to generation as we're seeing here in the Appalachian mountains. The old people that are in nursing homes now wore the bibbed overalls, work boots and a hat with brim all the way around. The women wore long dresses and had long hair. Next is the guys in tshirts, bluejeans and workboots, the girls in tight bluejeans Barbie girls. Next, the ones that dress like kids in California, white guys with pants slung low, looking like tv, the girls a legion of Britney Spears look-alikes. It's all around the world now.

The 20th century was a traverse through the unknown. Ever since the 1950s we've all accustomed ourselves to living in a world that can go Big Bang any minute. and the time we're in now, even more. It's like the unknown is in the past and we're off into quantum space, anti-matter, words we have no understanding of, concepts unimaginable a few years ago, entire ways of seeing changed. My grandparents grew up listening to string band square dance music. My parents listened to big band orchestra dance music. I grew up listening to rock & roll in the 50s when it was dance music. These are the changes forecast in the prophecies down through time telling of a new world entirely unlike the world before. We're close. My guess is that when the sequence of events is such that it's time to have a big clean sweep of all that went before, the event called Armageddon evidently will be the climax of the change.

After that, a thousand years of peace. Armageddon will be the end of capitalism too, because there can be no peace in the world involved in the capitalist economic system. I'd say capitalism is doomed on that alone. If we're to have a thousand years of peace, it will have to be an entirely different economic system. We'll have money, but a more realistic vision of it as a tool, a utility. Capitalism is not the god America has made itself a shrine to. I imagine in a time of peace that many years, following a time of war that goes all the way back to before we left the trees, will be a major shift in how we humans view our world and each other. I can't imagine what it will be like. People relaxed toward one another. A great reduction in population will get the numbers back to where it was before oil and electricity.

A thousand years of peace would mean tremendous collective devotion to God after having our collective consciousness raised to such a place that we who are able assist the ones unable to care for themselves, allowing them a reasonable quality of life. No need to punish them for being unable. Where'd the crime go? Empty prisons could be altered into regional art galleries, theater and dance complexes with schools for all the art forms. I imagine an art boom like the entertainment boom we're in now, a balance to this time where nobody much knows anything about art. Today on Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, a Saturday radio show with people from the audience and people by phone answering questions about events in the news over the last week, the stumper was a question about the vision of the Fauve school of painting. Everybody was stumped. Nobody knew what Fauve was. Long silence. Too long for On Air. Finally, the questioner explained and gave the answer. I imagine in the thousand years of peace everyone will know the answer. The art of the 20th century will be the classical age for that time.

THE SOULS OF ANIMALS

2012-01-27T07:49:00.000-05:00

caterpillar

I've seen the process of older people going into a zone where they're not connected with this world any more. I don't mean like a helium balloon set loose to float into the clouds, rather an unwillingness to keep up with all the new gadgets after a lifetime of keeping up. There comes a time it doesn't matter who has a new book out or who has a new album out or what's the latest. The latest is of no concern any more. I don't even want to hear about it. This may be what is meant by the world passing us by. I recall an aunt lighting into me on the day Conway Twitty died, because I didn't know about it. Hadn't listened to the news that day. She assessed that I need to get out of these mountains and into the real world. Real world? The real world of television? The real world of pop radio? I get all that here in the mountains, and a better range of choices than any one place in the Flatland. Auntie and I had a go-round in that phone conversation. When she asked if I like Conway Twitty, I said no, but I appreciate him as a musician. She lectured me that I can't appreciate something I don't like.

Yesterday, I was asked to explain how "evolution" says we came from monkeys. I explained we're one of the great apes, our branch in the tree of evolution is between the gorilla and the chimpanzee. Then I was told it's bullshit. Whatever. I'm not arguing that one. It's like the saying, you had to be there. I've thought a little bit about it since then. The fundamentalist refusal to believe we "came from monkeys" is based in a certain belief-system's way of seeing that overlooks almost everything. In Christendom we're taught that animals are unconscious, and especially devoid of a soul. Christendom says only humans have souls. It's only the forebrain we have that the animals don't have. The forebrain is not the soul. If God is love, then the soul is love. I've seen too much love in animals I have known to say they don't have a soul. It's an absurd distinction to make. Love is love, no matter how it manifests. One of my great learnings in the mountains has been how much animals love us.

I see each of the dogs and cats that has lived here with me as a step up the staircase of learning that the four-leggeds have tremendous capacity for love, both giving and receiving. That a dog will protect its human unto its own demise is an expression of love. I even feel shame at how little I understood the animal world. I didn't have anything to go by. The culture I've lived in all my life regards animals about the same as fence posts you have to feed. When I began to discover emotions in dogs, and thinking, I felt like I was seeing deep in the unknown. Even doubted what I was seeing. I have watched both dogs and cats think. I have seen them figure things out. Sadie, the first dog, I saw barking at the end of a hollow tree trunk like a ground squirrel or something ran up there. She barked and fussed over the opening at the end. She stopped and looked at the situation, and after assessing her intent, she tore into the trunk about where she though It was hiding. She ripped and tore at the thin wood with her teeth, opening a great hole in the side of the old log.

Same dog, Sadie, I have seen stalk a groundhog that was maybe 30 feet from its hole. Dog was about same distance from hole as groundhog, a different direction, creeping in the tall grass toward the hole. When she reached the place she saw she could get to the hole before the groundhog, she jumped up and started running full speed toward the hole. Groundhog saw her and took off running toward the hole. Just before the groundhog reached the hole, dog hit groundhog with the top of her head running full speed. Groundhog rolled over and was scrambling to its feet when dog turned around and sank her teeth into the back of the groundhog's neck, picked it up, snapped its neck and groundhog was dead. Dog took groundhog to a place she knew the ground to be soft, dug a hole, pushed the groundhog in with her nose, and covered the groundhog with dirt pushed onto it with her nose. She started burying the groundhogs she killed after seeing me bury a groundhog she'd carried under the house to her dog den. She watched me bury it and from then on buried every one she killed.

Sadie came to me when she was 3 years old and already named. I didn't want to change her name, though I didn't really resonate with it. Still, it was her name. She was a mix of an airdale and a foxdog. Sadie came to love me far more than I knew. I didn't even notice it was love for several years. And I realized after she died that I hadn't even noticed her love for me. She was a dog. Dogs don't love. That was the wall, not believing it. With next dog, I learned to honor the love. With Aster, I opened up and let the love flow between us. I studied the love in Aster. She could figure things out too. I've just now been overwhelmed by emotion, remembering my friends of many years, what good friends they were. I'm like in the song about Mr Bo Jangles, "his dog up and died, after 20 years he still grieves." With every one of them, I've asked myself, would I die for my four-legged friend as readily as friend would die for me. The answer is always no. And I feel undeserving of their love.

No, it's not just love between humans that "counts." Love is love. When a child loves a gerbil, it's love. Caterpillar is the last of my four-legged friends. By now, I have learned how to receive the love, aware that love is what it is. If the soul is the seat of love in us, then Caterpillar has a soul, as have all the animals I've lived with. They didn't have any problem knowing about love. I was the one that didn't know. It must be frustrating for them to love us so much and it not be noticed. I've learned what complete "people" dogs and cats are, and by extending that I can see that monkeys must be a lot of fun to know. If we could see a monkey or a chimp from God's way of seeing, we'd be very much surprised by their intelligence and would see no shame in calling them ancestors. They lack the ego that keeps us tied up in knots and committed to self-destructive behavior. It's the ego in us that separates us from the four-leggeds and ashamed to call a monkey ancestor. It's the human arrogant expression of ego that gives the animal world consideration as commodity only.

WHITE MAN'S LAST STAND: THE SEQUEL

2012-01-25T20:28:00.001-05:00

thank you walt handlesman of newsday

We can count on Romney to make the day's news funny, funny like Laurel and Hardy, slapstick. It looks like he's attempting to one-up Sarah Palen with a new word for the dictionary: prebuttal. Unless it's in the multi-volume OED. Not only is Mitt the richer of the two, he can invent words, too, for the television audience that doesn't know an invented word from a school-learned word. Then there is Newt(er). Is this another turning point in politics led by the repubs? After hounding Clinton about whether or not he inhaled, the repubs used the partisan Supremes to usurp the Oval Office with a cocaine-snorter, draft-dodger, cheerleader, drunk driver, all in one. Now Gingrich is running with his adultery as a badge--white man Nordic wife, Aryan--and it's working. We'll be hearing more of his racist one-line jokes that get forwarded among republicans by email.

I attempted to listen to the presidential speech last night, but went to bed after about 5 minutes of Obama talking. Thought I'd listen to it in bed. It put me soundly to sleep right away. Great lullaby. I feel partial to Obama, but his speeches are so safe, so nearly irrefutable, that just about nothing gets said. He started off talking about what he wants to do. I tuned out right there. He's not going to do anything he "wants" to do. He'll do whatever works, which is just about nothing where republicans are involved. Hearing about 10 minutes, I concluded he wasn't saying anything, and if he were to say something, I'd hear it on the news all week. And I was o'ertaken by unconsciousness.

I find it funny, too, that in the same news cast as our government praising Arab Spring for bringing democracy to Egypt, we hear about Occupy protesters in American cities arrested, laws passed to restrict them. During the Bush-Cheney-Rummy-Rice Junta protesters were caged and rendered nonexistent. And oh we're so happy to be able to enforce "democracy" in Iraq after a decade of destroying the Iraqi people's way of life, killing several hundred thousand of them, when the "pre-emptive strike" had the spoken purpose of getting Saddam. They got him, and the rape of the Iraqi people in the name of democracy, "Iraqi Freedom," continued like nothing happened. Not one of the many "reasons" we were given by our government had anything to do with anything. They were not even justifications. I take it they were answers that came up at a meeting where the question went around, What do we tell them they'll believe? The people I've known who are constant liars seem to me to craft their stories around what they think I'll believe. The first tenet of fiction: be believable.

I've found about everything our government tells us is false in one way or another. Tells me our government is a serial liar. What do I think of people who only lie to me when they talk to me? I don't have anything to do with them. Somebody I can't avoid, I'll be respectful with, but won't pay attention to anything they say, certainly won't repeat anything they say without citing the source. I have become so jaded after experiencing Johnson, Nixon, Reagan, Bush1 and Bush2, Newt Gingrich and Karl Rove the strategists with no bottom to how low they will go, I withdraw hope. The Dem strategists have a job ahead of them. They'll be up against Gingrich and Rove, two who have proven themselves ruthless and absolutely devoid of concern for We The People. Winning is their game, whatever it takes. I thought the election of 2008 was white man's last stand, but it looks like white man is about to make another stand. The white racist party has very cleverly picked the Aryan wannabe to represent party philosoph, Rush Limbaugh. If not for fear the American nazi party could slither its way into power again, this particular election process could be riotously funny. I'm curious to see how close to up front the racism will be.

A POEM BY MAY SWENSON

2012-01-23T22:57:00.000-05:00

                WAITING FOR IT

          My cat jumps to the window sill

          and sits there still as a jug.

          He's waiting for me, but I cannot be

          coming, for I am in the room.

          His snout, a gloomy V of patience,

          pokes out into the sun.

          The funnels of his ears expect

          to be poured full of my footsteps.

          It, the electric moment, a sweet

          mouse, will appear; at his gray

          eye's edge I'll be coming home

          if he sits on the window ledge.

          It is here, I say, and call him

          to my lap. Not a hair

          in the gap of his ear moves.

          His clay gaze stays steady.

          That solemn snout says: It

          is what is about to happen, not

          what is already here.

                                   ---May Swenson

                                         (1913-1989)

                              *

GUNZ

2012-01-22T14:46:00.001-05:00

james rosenquist

Michael Moore's Bowling For Columbine has just now ended. I come away from his films in awe every time, in awe that he speaks for me and the other people who have no say. I don't care what the spin from the blockhead arena had to say about Moore. I don't care if he's had a drink or played cards one day in his life. In the time since the Supremes made it clear to us at the turn of the century that we have no more democracy, and the Bush administration set police state in motion, Michael Moore was the only voice speaking for we the people. He was discredited and given the corporate assassination of character treatment, which actually worked very well, briefly. The fiction created to discredit Moore didn't silence him, though it turned a lot of people away, the ones that didn't understand Moore anyway. It shut down the influence the film Sick-O might have had on health care legislation. It was legal assassination. No cadaver. But Moore charges on and I'm grateful to him for his will power. His audience is his own. It is not a "television audience."

He has a website http://www.michaelmoore.com/ where you can see what he's up to today. The thread that ran through Bowling for Columbine was the search by asking several people what it is that makes Americans so free to kill, when in Canada with the same gun ownership freedoms, Canadians choose not to kill. Charlton Heston answered the question with the most educated answer I heard in the film, "American history has a lot of blood on its hands." I have to say I was not with Moore humiliating Charlton Heston in his own home. He was graciously allowed to intrude and was treated very well. My political regard for Heston is opposition. But I still believe it's important to respect him as a man in his own home. Moore has his own dose of American arrogance. I don't know what it would take for me to disrespect a man as Moore did Heston, and filming it, putting it in an Academy Award winning documentary. I can see Moore's revenge thinking, which perhaps overrode his own hesitations where respect was concerned. Maybe the disrespect was his active expression of absence of respect. That's sure how it came across. I still regard Moore a very important influence in the first decade of the 21st century. He did his part.

That karma Heston referenced, blood on our hands, the karma in American History, applies to what the white people did to the Indians from coast to coast, to the black people coast to coast. American foreign policy amounts to overthrowing democracies in third world countries and putting a dictator in charge. It's about money; the canal, United Fruit Co, oil and coca cola, cheap labor. Let alone the serious crimes against nature, like the slaughter of the buffalo to starve the Indians and kill their culture, the concentration camps Indians live in unto this day called reservations. Like calling torture rendition. The people that live in the West around Indians have at least as much racial prejudice toward the Indians as the white people in the South have toward black people, and point the finger at the South for racism. But the people that don't like Indians are ok, because Indians don't even figure for liberals. I pray: May all the Indian reservations have successful casinos where the white people come from all around to give them money. Something else for the file, Theater of the Absurd in Everyday Life.

One karmic pattern I see is the contempt for the poor. As the world's monopoly super power, we have the longest war of our history each time we attack (pre-emptive strike) a defenseless poor country of colored people to take whatever natural resource we want, now oil. What's the point of having power unless you use it. The passion for killing has been an American monopoly since the beginning. The genocide was not just with the Indians, but the natural world of animals and birds as well. The Carolina parakeet went extinct right away because of its colorful plumage, easy to get a bead on, good target practice. America was settled in the belief of self as holy. There was plenty of God religion on Sunday morning, but the rest of the week was about self and money only. The Indians that kept the continent for a few thousand years with clean water and abundant resources lived their association with God every minute. They saw themselves part of God's creation living in God's creation. They were happy with the abundance. Then along came Western Civilization and made a gaping wound of an entire continent in two centuries--want creating want.

As in one individual's inner development, so it goes with the whole. The difference I see between USA and Canada where murder rates with guns are concerned, tells me the issue is not guns, but belief systems, attitudes. I don't believe it's violent movies, either. I heard someone tell a statistic on NPR I believed; on weekends when a big Arnold or Rambo type movie is released, crime rate drops in the cities where the film is showing. It suggests to me sublimation. If these films do sublimate feelings the people that see them are feeling, it tells me a great deal of anger pervades the land. These films sublimate all around the world. They play to the working class male audience. There is, indeed, a great deal of anger running through the working class, expressed best in heavy metal rock. I see teenagers with anger in their eyes, anger due to home situations, wearing death-metal, hard-core tshirts with skulls the primary image. Bob Dylan expressed the anger in the middle-class audience in a non-violent way. Same anger, different expression.

Looking at these films as collective dreams, then analyzing them like dreams, it tells quite a lot about our collective belief systems. Again, like everything else, it cannot be regarded an absolute for all. Some people like action movies overdone with killing. Some people like no killing at tall. Some people like mildly comic relationship stories. We have a seemingly limitless variety of kinds of movies for the seemingly endless range of human interest. Not everybody in America is seething with anger. But an awful lot are. We see them among the people we know. In the land of if-it-feels-good-do-it, acting out anger lethally onto others, most often family, feels good unrestrained by foresight, the American blind spot, until consequences come next.

So many times judges have heard, If I'd a-thought about it before I pulled the trigger, I wouldn' a-done it. If our murder rate by guns is a social consequence of absence of foresight, acting without thinking, the dumbing down of America has brought us to the self-destruction that follows decisions made in ignorance. Instead of looking to see what's behind the anger that has become the prevailing American attitude, hand-in-hand with arrogance, over the last half century, we build more prisons. Next, we'll have to keep the crime rate up to justify the prisons. An economic self-sustaining eco-system. Crime up, jobs up. Sounds great on the evening news.

SKEEETER AND THE SKIDMARKS IN PICTURES

2012-01-21T02:57:00.000-05:00

skeeter and the skidmarks

edwin lacy, sandy mason grover, willard gayheart

sandy mason grover and willard gayheart

edwin lacy and willard gayheart

scott freeman and edwin lacy

scott freeman

edwin lacy

willard gayheart

Another show of some very much alive mountain music by Skeeter and the Skidmarks at Willard Gayheart's gallery, The Front Porch, in the Fiddle and Plow series. This was the 5th or 6th, I suspect 6th, show they've played at the Front Porch in the last couple years of the Fiddle and Plow series. I know Skeeter's music backwards and forwards, and especially appreciate that every time they've put on a Skeeter show, each one was unique in the manner of how they played the songs. It all has to do with how and what they're feeling on a given night. Edwin drives a couple hours to get there and Sandy drives about that far too. As soon as the music started tonight I heard a new Skeeter vibe. It was an understated flow tonight. That doesn't say much. It was more relaxed than usual. The second time they played there, it was an assault from start to finish, on the intensity level of a concert in an auditorium. It's been different every time, and I was charmed to hear tonight a new sound I'd not heard from them.

I told Edwin and Scott after the show that they've messed up my mind. I know all the words to I Love You Nelly. I told Edwin, "It's your fault." In good humor. The funny part is I love the song now. It plays in my head, I know all the words. Just like Won't You Ride In My Little Red Wagon that Scott and Willard play with a western swing like Bob Wills. And Scott sang another western swing, Roly Poly. Skeeter's Yellow Rose Of Texas had a casual swing to it tonight. Maybe that's the word for tonight's music, casual. It wasn't casual like slack. They were right there with the music, making music every minute. When I say they make music, I mean music that's infectious, music that makes you tap your feet or move in whatever ways. It was the way they felt tonight. I love these songs now after hearing Scott and Willard play them the last couple years, as well as from the Skeeter and the Skidmarks cds, Hubbin It and Alternate Roots, both out of print. Scott put together some Skeeter songs from their 2 cds to make a 1 cd collection, a best-of kind of thing, though all songs on both albums are best of. Excellent, classic albums made in the early 90s. As fresh today as then. The Skeeter sound will always be fresh.

My feeling while sitting there in the presence of Scott and Willard's music, was I'm as satisfied hearing Scott and Willard as any music I've ever heard live. I don't need to pay $20 - $30 to hear Ricky Skaggs or Allison Krauss or Rhonda Vincent for some good music. Scott and Willard have a sound together that satisfies my ear for music as much as Ralph Stanley does. They are the equals in musicianship of people in Stanley's band. They're the equals of the professional musicians that run the roads in buses. Scott and Willard don't want to live like that. They want to make music and enjoy it, in the mountain way. Willard's singing is entirely different from Ralph Stanley's, but I love hearing Willard sing as much as I love hearing Ralph Stanley. If you're a Ralph Stanley fan, he's scheduled to play at Fairview Ruritan February 4, a Saturday.

Toward the end of the show tonight, I was feeling one with the flow of the music. The band was in their groove and everybody in the place was in some kind of motion, especially the inner motion of flowing with the music within where we hear music, the place where we hear truly satisfying music. First, it's music that is music. I believe God sent me to them, them to me. Since I've known Scott, the music he and Willard make, then with their band Alternate Roots, now back to Skeeter, their band before Alternate Roots, back together and recording some tracks from time to time toward a new cd. I feel so privileged to be able to hear their music so much.

I feel like one of the people who lived in Greenwich Village when Bob Dylan was hanging in the Village, saw him all the time, when he wasn't heard of yet. Talented, they said of Dylan. Talented is what I say of Scott and Willard, Edwin and Sandy, too. When they get together, the sound that emerges is not the sound of any one of them. It's the Skeeter sound that happens when these four play together. One of them replaced by somebody else and the Skeeter sound is no longer happening. They're not a widely known band. They self-produce their music. Their musicianship is good as it gets, and their approach to a song is as good as it gets. Scott and Willard are the most actively creative people I know. Every time I drive home from a show at Woodlawn, I feel blessed.

COMFORTABLE WITH WINTER

2012-01-20T00:10:00.000-05:00

location for the film noi the albino, iceland

This morning I went out to feed the birds, it 25 degrees. I noticed when I stepped through the open doorway into the cold, I didn't brace against it, walked into it relaxed, thinking of the people living in Scandinavian countries, not the least bit shy of cold air. In an Icelandic film, Noi the Albino, I saw a high school girl putting gas in a car, wearing a tshirt, acting like it's the same as summer, and it snowing. In Danish film, Smilla's Sense of Snow, Smilla tells of growing up in Greenland until her mother died and her dad moved back to Copenhagen, where he was from originally. Smilla could not stand the heat in the house. She lived outside the house in a tent until she became acclimatized. In The Sea, I saw a woman in mini-skirt, no shoes, lying in the snow, passed out drunk. I see those people going into the cold like we go into a summer day, here at latitude 36. Iceland is latitude 64-67. It's northern extremities touch the Arctic Circle, where it is only cold to Xtreme cold. Iceland's latitude is the same as the northern parts of Norway. For time measured in millions of years, this island in the North Sea was washed clean of soil a long time ago. Fishing is how they live, not agriculture. Rock and ice everywhere.

I've been enjoying the films primarily because they are so well made; excellent writing, excellent directing, acting awfully good, good story. Now I'm finding these Scandinavian stories are giving me new insight into winter. Before, and I mean all my life, I've braced against the cold and waited for it to leave by end of May, worn out from waiting. About mid February I am ready for winter to be over and it's just the half way point. Looking at these stories of people who live where it is cold all the time, I see them relaxed with it, flowing with it. At this time in the life I'm paying attention to my own flow, feeling my way with it, and found this morning feeding the birds and later walking to the mailbox without putting on a jacket, that I flowed with the cold, didn't even shiver like a dog when I came back into the house. The cold amounted to a sensation, neither pain nor pleasure, neutral. It never occured to me to use these films going into winter to subconsciously acclimatize self to cold all the time.

Helsinki, Stockholm and Oslo, latitudes 59-61 are up there with the latitude of Fairbanks, Alaska, and the Bering Strait at latitude 65, the land of the midnight sun. Sweden is famous around the world for its suicide rate, which I've attributed to year round cold. But, here in Alleghany County, between latitudes 36 and 37, we have the same suicide rate as Sweden that is way up north. It's not the cold or the midnight sun. Possibly a Protestant belief system the two places share and a certain pride, a mixture of possible "causes." Only the individuals know the causes, and they're not telling. Twice I've been asked by psychotherapists if I'd ever thought about killing myself. I said, "Of course." Did that ever set the pens in motion. Right away they wanted to get me in treatment. I'm then obliged to explain I have never thought about it to do it, but it naturally is one of those subjects we humans think about and wonder why other people do it, wonder if there really are advantages to it. Of course I think about it. I've never met anyone who hasn't thought about it, same as we think about what it would be like to be killed. I'm not one to entertain that kind of thinking, but the curiosity has arisen. What would I say? "Oh shit." "Gawd-damn." "Fuck." I'd go into Eternity laughing like a monkey if one of these turned out to be my last word, or all of them. Steve Jobs saw the light, saying, "Oh Wow," three times. Like my friend Lorne Campbell thought it hilarious that Elvis died on the toilet. That was how he wanted to go. And he did.

I appreciate very much how seeing these films has relaxed my attitude toward the cold. I've looked up information about the Sami people, the indigenous people that live in the upper regions of Norway, Sweden, Finland and over into Russia. They drive vehicles not built for speed, but for driving in deep snow all the time. They're boxes, Hummers without side windows that look like square box vans. Big snow tread tires that set the car body way up off the ground like a mud-sling pickup from around here. They look like they could climb up and over a snow drift. The Sami look like some rugged people, too. I look at the faces and see a variety, like everywhere else. Where do they get firewood? They need to keep a fire going year round. Snuggle into a bed of polar bear fur. Let it snow. The Sami would be the European continent's counterpart of Alaska's northernmost people, what we call the Eskimos. These are the kinds of places I'd have to be born and grow up in to tolerate the summers, let alone the winters. There are people who spend their lives going about in arctic water in a kayak, water so cold that if your kayak flips over, you're dead. That's dangerous water. Wait with a spear at the blow hole for a seal to surface for air, to eat its body and wear its skin. It's rugged living, but when it's been done for so many thousand years it has no beginning, it's just how we do things around here.

Actually, I had never given any thought to the weather in the Scandinavian countries, just thought of it as cold and snow. One of the aspects of the cold in these films I'm seeing--I've noticed a casual attitude toward the door like in America. In Noi the Albino, he goes in the house, snow and freezing outside, and leaves the door open. Today I saw the Swedish film The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. In a scene with a little old uninsulated house with a wood stove. The Girl with the tattoo walks right in and gets with her computer, leaving the door open and it below freezing outside. I saw it another time in another film. It struck me a very casual relationship with the cold. When I saw the man carry firewood into the house, I wondered what he wanted for a fire. Three little logs that wouldn't last an hour in a house that had been vacant that it would take a few days to get the walls warm. That little bit of wood he put in the stove wouldn't put a warm spot on any wall in the house. That I took for something a director decided not to waste time on, getting a good fire going and heating the place well.

Evidently, the people of those latitudes up north experience the cold very differently from how we feel it where winter is not with us all the time. I can imagine the coldness would get old to the point of acceptance and go on being old. Yet the people that live in it seem to have no issue with the weather, the same as we don't here, except for complaining about its extremes. I'm glad every day that I've pursued a Scandinavian film festival from netflix. It used to be Bergman was the only Scandinavian film maker I knew of. Now, I see he is one of many. One of many truly Xcellent film makers.

A WORLD SAFE FOR GIRLS

2012-01-19T00:23:00.000-05:00

joan mitchell, sunflowers II

Hearing a woman talk on a radio talk show, On Point, I think is what it's called. She'd written about making a world safe for girls. She had a host of interesting points. Mostly, it was in relation to boys, who are like dogs (my word, not hers), predictably out of control. The woman who was with the interviewer several times had to bring up that everybody is not just alike, that not all girls are raised in pink bedrooms. Throughout the hour, I was puzzled by this woman's one dimensional vision of life in this world. Without meaning to be, she was thinking via corporate packaging in terms of a society where everyone is just alike, has the same opportunities, etc. My mind kept finding exceptions galore. A young woman I know, 29, brilliant mind, PhD, gentle, loving, caring, beautiful human being. None of this is exaggeration. I know a guy, 29, brilliant mind, HS, rough, loving, caring, beautiful human being. He came from such a dysfunctional house, his mind couldn't focus on school, on learning. He learned well, but not with the ease and uncluttered mind of someone else, who was raised without hitting or berating.

No matter how much we try to be Barbie and GI Joe, some girls just don't have blond hair and some guys don't want to be killing people. All the time I was coming up through the 1950s, the rule was boys are supposed to be interested in sports and the glory of the Army. I didn't give a shit about any of it. It's not like there are other possibilities. It's a minority of the high school boys that play football and basketball. Most of the guys don't play sports and don't want to. But they don't even figure. In high school, I liked going to football and basketball games, but didn't want to be in them. I hated playing basketball in gym class. Liked football and baseball as things I wouldn't be doing by choice, but are ok when you have to. I had no influences coming in from outside the working class baptist world of a few people who believed they had something nobody else had. All I could see they had was poverty and egoism. By the time I emerged from high school, family and church, and started going about in the world, I had no idea what any of it was about. School doesn't teach "real world." Church doesn't either. Parents insulated themselves from it, because they didn't get it. Rock and roll was my only other influence, and it certainly didn't teach living in the world, that is, with any sort of inner balance.

Much of the woman's talk on the radio tonight had to do with protecting the girls from the boys. It tells me the boys need some reining in. The whole of American society gives the high school athlete privileges the other boys don't have. The college athletes are shamelessly privileged and exploited. They are the university's big money ticket. Tom Wolfe's novel, I Am Charlotte Simmons, gives a good view of how ill prepared some young girls can be for the cut loose jocks who have no boundaries where how they treat the little girls is concerned. It is a truth that the girls need protection from the boys. But not all boys. Only certain boys. Not all parents know how to teach their girls how to live safely in a world where boys are not trained to decency. It's the warrior culture where boys are given privileges because they'll be going to war soon. In war they will learn discipline, leadership, and a lot of them will die or be physically or mentally broken for life. Like boys have to put their lives on the line at a certain age, meaning it's ok for them to ramble and throw liquor bottles out car windows. Again, it's only a certain percentage. It might be up around 30%. Less than 10% the Henry Rollins / Ice T testosterone expression. They're mostly in the military or prison.

Girls do need protection from boys. And boys do need training. Our society doesn't do well at training boys. Boys are brought up in the society's belief system about boys. The rooster syndrome makes it very difficult for one man to train another outside a military, mass, shared experience. One man tells another what to do and you can be sure that's the last thing the one told will ever do. It is so easy to see men as roosters everywhere you look. I see myself and friend I wrote about in OVER LUNCH a few weeks ago, at lunch, across the table from each other like roosters, neck feathers sticking out, necks taught, feet ready to spring with the spurs, beaks ready to bite, chickens playing the testosterone game, squaring off. I would so happily be the rooster not looking to fight, but about any rooster I know has to play the testosterone game in one way or another in varying degrees. In the working class, I can kick your ass. In the middle class, I know more than you do. In the ruling class, I have more assets than you. Hippy being a middle-class phenomenon, the hipper-than-thou game was a de-intellectualization of the I-know-more-than-you-do game. Lunch friend plays both. He helps me appreciate my friends who don't play rooster games.

I suppose what some people are looking for, the ones that believe we're one large mass of the same thing in multiples, is a solution that will calm the stormy sea of humanity. Who knows how to make social changes that would protect naive girls from predator boys? That's a tall order. I can't help but think it's one of those aspects of living in this world we have to learn how to live with. First, have to pay attention to it. Awareness is the first step to solving issues that need changing. Always something is needing change, and I can't help but see that a good thing. Keeps everything fresh. Though, at the same time, it makes a traiditonal society seem awfully refreshing where the people have believed the same thing on the same land in the same way of life for multiple thousands of years. Given that we humans have lived tribally a lot longer than we have lived in the lonely crowd, it's something like our foundation. The distribution of the world's population today is people leaving traditional societies and going to the city where they can make money and party.

When I think about waking up somebody's baby to be raised as their child sometime in the next 20 years or so, I tremble in fear. The baby of a teenage girl in Milwaukee date-raped by a guy home from the Army on leave. Everything is possible. I don't even think about it. It can make me afraid of dying again, the fear of coming back. Do I want to do this again? Hell no! I don't ever want to go through the confusion of the first half of this lifetime again. It was like a pinball on its own particular path from bumper to bumper, driven by gravity, rolling on chance. A flipper sends the ball back to the top where it bumps its way back down the playing field, another slap by a flipper back through the minefield of bumpers and lights rolling with gravity toward the hole, end of game, and a flipper sent the ball rolling back to the top to bump through the minefield of bumpers, dings and lights, and then the flipper was too late, the hole snatched the ball. Boing. A new ball in the playing field.

TO LOVE: POEM BY NIRALA (1899-1961)

2012-01-18T12:29:00.001-05:00

meher baba, by nad wolinska

            TO LOVE

           While finite nature still lay in the trance

           of Infinity you, beginningless,

         were only darkness, until perverse creation

         stirred by its own desire alone was set

          once more in motion. Fruit of delusion, you

           descended then into the world,

           kindling the lightning's magic in the breast,

           ever transforming mere sensation into

           substance, as waters turn to mist, then clouds.

          Attired in the brilliant raiment of desiring,

          creation became temptation. Forms, locking

         their arms around each other, surmised, "Now we

         have found it!" But then alas, bodies trapped

          in the small errors of their judgment, they

         both understood: love it had never been

          but the shadow of love.

                                                 Yet love shall always be

          the unstrung chain of diamonds on every breast,

          though tangling every soul entangled never,

          but ever the sovereign power.

                                                   --- Nirala
                                  (tr by David Rubin)

THE SEA THE MOVIE: DYSFUNCTIONAL FAMILY REUNION

2012-01-17T10:10:00.000-05:00

The film of the day is THE SEA, an Icelandic film directed by Baltasar Kormakur. It's a story of a given family's dysfunction best symbolized in a moment toward the end when grown daughter tells aunt, who is also step mother, to get her a cup of tea. Auntie says, "You're no guest of mine." An hour before, she would have done it. The story begins with man and woman on a plane flying to a little town on the eastern shore of the island, the opposite end from Reykjavik. He is an Icelander and she's French. They live in Paris. He's going home for a few days because dad called the 3 kids together from their different places. In the plane, she said she's looking forward to meeting his family. He said, "Just wait til the monsters start crawling out from their hiding places." She said, "After living with you, I don't think there's many things that can surprise me." This was the beginning. In the climactic blow-out scene near the end, she held her face in her hands, surprised and then some.

Before the plane touches ground, we understand we're in for a dysfunctional family reunion called by the old man for reasons only he knew. He was a moderately wealthy fisherman who had grown his business into a factory operation, sent two of his kids off to university in Europe, paid their ways through school; whenever they drop by Iceland, it's to get some money from dad. We get to know everyone individually, each one a sympathetic individual, and when they get together, they don't make any music. Dad being the root of the family dysfunction, the one everybody has problems over, is a sympathetic man. His case is as valid as anyone's, perhaps more so. Like everybody who supports someone else, he's a bit frustrated over absence of expressed gratitude. Though from the point of view of the grown kids, they've got it coming from all he put them through as children, every kind of abuse there is. The youngest daughter, living at home, half-sister to the brother living in Paris, is crazy in love with him and they get together in private when they can. It's them in the picture above.

We are told at the beginning, by way of the son from Paris telling his girlfriend that what we're about to see is Iceland, laying its soul bare for the world to see. It makes me wonder if the film freaked the Icelandic people like Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint freaked American Jews for all that it told about the culture from within. The girlfriend from Paris is of a gentle nature, a flute player in a symphony. She is the audience in one person. She learns what we learn as the story goes along. She has the misfortune of being intimately involved. She's looking at her own future. She's pregnant; therefore, committed. Not so easy to back out now. The daughter's husband, who I took for Swedish, was familiar with the family psychology, and not engaged. He knew before they arrived that it would be hell to pay before the return home. Their teenage son wandered about in the film like an American teenage slacker.

Three generations are represented in the film during this time of rapid international change away from traditional cultures into a common culture of various languages. The old man worked hard all his life. First, a fisherman in the North Sea, rugged work. He was a worker and it paid off for him. He drove a new red Cadillac. His fish factory was a major business in the town. He noted about changing times, walking through the factory where several Chinese people were working, saying it's looking like an international airport in there. His generation was the original Icelanders, Scandinavians on an island for several centuries, hard working fishermen. In the next generation, the daughter went to 8 years of film school in Poland, paid for by hard working daddy. The son went to school in Paris, paid for by hard working daddy. The third son stayed home and took care of the fish factory, but not well enough to suit the old man, of course. We only see the three children of the son who stayed on the island while they're watching tv, and once looking at their mother lying in the snow in her party dress drunk.

The eye of the storm was the old man's wife, Kristin, if I recall correctly, the observer. She sees and hears, but stays out of it. None of the kids liked her and she was not overwhelmed with enthusiasm for them. The old man was her husband, her lover, the man she lived in the house with, the house that was suddenly full of takers, who only showed up when they wanted to take something, like money. She knew beforehand what we learned about the visitors, that they only regarded the old man as money bags. Her reticence throughout the story is explained by the end, when seen alone with her husband again, happy to be back with her man, minus all his loose ends flapping in the breeze. And more than likely happy she'll see none of them again, before the funeral.

It turned out to be one of the family reunions of volatile temperaments that explodes with the energy all the elements brought to the explosion. Only grandma, who watched tv with headphones, came through the ordeal without a scar. They were all weak and of no account to her. She was the old Icelandic culture, a shell of it washed up on the beach. Occasionally, she'd make a comment as a detached observer from the old world. In her words, she was only half alive. The old man's complaint, which she would have seconded, was that none of the younger ones had ever worked, had any sense of what work was. Their complaint was that they do work, just not in fishing boats. Everybody focused on self, no one willing to bridge the gaps between themselves and the others, ended up with everybody estranged from everybody else, like usual. Everybody went home wounded in one way or another, each in his and her own ways, the Parisian flautist in shock.

STAY OUTTA MY FACE

2012-01-16T14:24:00.000-05:00

caterpillar lioness

Wondering what it is about cats and dogs, pets, that is so satisfying for me all along my way. In childhood, I had dogs, cats, chickens and caged birds (canaries and parakeets) for pets. I've never been one to sit with a dog or a cat and tell it my troubles, or anything. I think of them living without words, so I prefer to communicate with them without words, learn their silent language and interact with them learning from them how to communicate without Sit, Heel, Roll Over, Shake hands, Play dead. I've never wanted to make a pet into a circus animal, though I have loved seeing shows of dogs jumping over backwards, jumping through a ring of fire, etc. What happens with me is I fall in love with them, they fall in love with me and we develop an inseparable relationship, such that if I were to die on Caterpillar, there's a good chance she'd die of grief soon after. When I lose one of my non-verbal friends, I feel the same grief as when a human friend dies.

About a year ago I read something that said pets are often surrogates for absence of human relationship. Maybe it is, maybe it's not. Sometimes when I hold Caterpillar and tell her I love her, I'll question if I'm playing surrogate. It always comes back, no. The human psyche is too powerful for me to attempt to live with another person's energy, psychology, control issues, needs, demands, wants, deception. Married, I would have to be one of those men who has his own space with a locked door that is off limits to kids and wives. Being honest with myself, I have found from experience that I don't do well living with somebody else. I get accused of not talking. What happens is, the other becomes so predictable she turns boring. This is what happened in the marriage. She became boring to me, because I knew in advance her response/reaction to anything I might say, so I wouldn't say it. She grew frustrated, because I talked so little, and I grew frustrated because she was too predictable. She had an endless list of wants that meant debt I couldn't stand living with. I felt lonely married and have never felt lonely unmarried. I feel lonely if I don't have a cat or a dog.

That's another marriage issue. "You love that damn dog more than you love me." It is so tempting to say, "That's right," but I know what comes next. Hell to pay. Like daddy telling me when I was 14 that he'll kill me if I join the Communist Party--this was back in McCarthy times when the government had the populace freaked over Communism, like they do over terrorism now. Then I hear, but terrorism is real. It's real only as a reaction to American aggression against poor people of color. The end of American aggression would be the end of terrorism if it weren't so convenient for population control, a shared enemy, a bad to contrast against our own good. Being told I'd be killed for joining the Communist Party set off an alarm. I'd never been interested in Communism before that moment. After that, I was looking for the recruiting station. Suddenly, I was sympathetic with Communism without even knowing what it was, except the preacher at church said it was bad.

I tried to look at Communism like something I'd like. I read about Stalin, Lenin, Trotsky, and said this was even worse than home. Hitler was home. Stalin was worse. Mao was worse. I was looking for an antidote to living under fascism. Finally, there came a time I realized, after much denial, that there is nothing desirable about Soviet and Maoist Communism. Wasn't anything desirable about Hitler either. Even though our American democracy is a matter of pretend, we white people, nonetheless, don't feel directly oppressed the way people in the Soviet bloc and mainland China felt it. Communism turned out to be a very dark, brooding cloud that controlled people by fear. That wasn't for me. That's what I was objecting to at home with parents, that dark, brooding cloud, control by fear. There's an old saying, nobody's happy when mama aint happy. It applies to daddy as well. Daddy's dark cloud brooded over the entire house. The tension in the house felt like something you had to cut your way through with a machete. It was the same dark brooding as I felt in Xao Xingjian's novel, One Man's Bible. Mao must not have been very happy; he kept his entire nation in brooding despair.

I dislike that oppressed feeling. I feel I understand it, somewhat, in the black people. It is a dark cloud the black people in America live under. The same can be said for Hispanics, anybody not white, except the poor. I'm privileged with whiteness, something I see in the white people around me that no one seems to get, that white people in American are privileged and take it for granted, same as the rich do with wealth. In most intimate proximity with another human, like living together, tensions grow and the feelings from my developing years trigger the feeling of oppression when I've got somebody I once thought something of yelling in my face telling me what's wrong with who I am. The next thing that happens is I'm gone, no turning back, no reassessing relationship, no apologies. The first time I showed this aspect of myself in married life was at a table playing bridge with X and her parents. I, a beginner, made a bad move. X across the table exploded into a rage at me for being stupid. I rose from my chair and announced, I will never play another game of bridge. Game over. That was it. I hate that shit. When I went out the door forever, it was after a shouting in my face experience when I told myself I do not have to live like this. I do have a choice.

My dogs and my cats are good company. That they don't talk is a lot to be said for them. I don't like to talk either, so we have good relationships. I have to watch the use of that word relationship. Since about the 1980s it has meant fucking. Like now, dating also means fucking. "We've been dating (fucking) for three months." When I say I have a relationship with my pets does not mean we're fucking. I think we have the original meaning of relationship. We care about each other, we live in the same place, I never yell at them, they never yell at me. I am so bad about being yelled at, that I have walked off jobs over it. I don't accept such behavior from anyone for any reason, no matter how close, no matter my vulnerability. When somebody believes they know me well enough they can yell in my face, is when they find out they don't know me at all. That individual dies to me. They actually die before my eyes. Not like fall down dead in imagination. It's like the person I once knew, I don't know any more. Whatever the nature of our relationship, it's over, totally. I figure somebody that needs to talk to me yelling and accusing is somebody who doesn't want me around. Dogs and cats don't tell things behind your back. They're not fickle and they don't deceive. I don't think of Caterpillar a surrogate of something I don't want. I think of her as my friend.

SCANDINAVIA IN MOVIES

2012-01-14T22:38:00.000-05:00

geiranger fjord

I've taken an interest in having a look at Scandanavian cultures, from Finland to Iceland, to Greenland. These are the descendants of the Vikings, or so I suppose. Getting some understanding of what it was about the Vikings, the Nordic wild men who wore helmets with bull horns sticking out of them. I've heard about the Vikings all my life, but knew little about them except they were from Norway, I supposed, and that was about it. Snow and ice everywhere all the time. I've been curious about what the fjords are like. Fjord is a word I remember from learning it in school, what an odd word it was, like when I learned island, that it was not is-land, but I-land. First grade. Substitute teacher that day. I thought it interesting that the coast of Norway had fjords all up and down it. Learned that Nazis used fjords for submarine hiding places during WW2. Norwegian skiers are consistently great skiers in international competitions. It's a country of mountains and snow. What else would you do there, besides ski and ice skate? One thing, you could work your ass off on a farm among rock cliffs a thousand feet high all your life in a dysfunctional extended family, fish and dream of America.

In the time of the Vikings there was no America. It was Turtle Island then, though the Vikings surely did not know it by that name. Danes settled Iceland, Greenland and probably over into Nova Scotia. I believe it's in Massachusetts that evidence of Viking visitors was found. Here, in our county, in Piney Creek, Phonecian markings have been found on a rock. Just because those people didn't have satellites and atomic bombs, it doesn't mean they were mindless. A dozen or more guys set out with oars and sails, an understanding of the night sky in relation to the earth. I see the fjords in movies and get a feeling for what they are and what they're like to look at from a boat in the water between rock mountains and cliffs both sides. People live in them. I look at the map of Norway and see fjords penetrating over a hundred miles inland, the western part of Norway stripped to bare rock by millions of years of wind from the North Sea up there where the Atlantic current makes the turn from going north along Greenland and Iceland and having to make the turn, like a U-turn in a river or creek, the water eats at the land until only the rock remains.

The satellite map of Norway looks like a large rake went over Norway, left to right. As long as the land masses of earth have been in the configuration they're in now, the constant wind and surges of storm, the wind full of water, most often ice, beating at the land until only rock cliffs are left, 500 ft to 1000 ft high, immoveable objects in relation to irresistable forces. The fjords are now veins running deep into the country, boats the form of transportation, boats for fishing, probably the way of life all up the coast to Trondheim and over the top of Sweden to Finland, where ice never thaws. Mountain people have the name world-round of being tough people for work and fighting. I'm beginning to have an idea that fjord people would make a good match for mountain people. What I saw in the film, I AM DINA, by Dane director, Ole Bornedal, made in a Norwegian fjord somewhere in the Bergen region, told me life in the fjord villages was intimate, extended family. Everybody hard working. Women had their hard work and the men had their hard work. The religion was absolute.

I've been paying attention to the architecture in Oslo I've seen in a few films, HAWAII, OSLO mostly filmed in the old parts of the city, and TROUBLED WATER in the newer parts of the city. I've gone to google maps and looked at Oslo from above. It looks like what I think of as bastions everywhere, buildings that look like their walls are 3 feet thick, like if a dump truck loaded with gravel was to hit one at 100mph, gravel would have gone everywhere, the cab accordioned to about a foot thick and not a dent in the side of the building. Might scratch the paint, but no more. Makes me wonder about the nature of the Norwegian people before Oslo became a city, in the time when they lived by fishing along the coast of fjords. Inland was mountains. It suggests to me that all along the history of people in that land now called Norway have lived in the face of the storms of the North Sea. I imagine the wind flying through those fjords for dozens of miles, icy wind raging through the wind tunnels. Surely, the people who settled along the fjords knew the best places to be out of the worst part of the wind. Generation after generation of people in direct relation to the North Sea where the landscape of Norway turns the ocean current all the way around. It seems natural the architecture in Oslo would have the power of presence of the Rock of Gibraltar. It looks like no force of nature could overwhelm the buildings of the old part of the city, like the cliffs along the coast.

If the Vikings consisted of people from Norwegian fjords and the Danes, who also face that North Sea, but without the mountains. These would be people whose lives had been lived in boats fishing. Taking off in a sailboat with a dozen or so others, they'd have no problem going anywhere they wanted. Fish were all around them anywhere they were. Take a horde of men from the fjords in boats with oars and sails, whose arms and legs are pure power, them going at it with axes and spears against Scottish and Irish, also people of the North Sea, shaped by the wind. I'd say it would be a formidable battle. It must have sent terror through a coastal village when the Vikings landed. Maybe. I don't know. Mind going off into imagination. The root of it is the people who came up in the Norwegian fjords would be formidable people. Much like mountain people in that what happens in the fjord stays in the fjord. And, like in the Appalachians, a similar culture all along the chain.

One thing I see, Norwegians are familiar with living in isolation. Though a day trip by boat to the next village couldn't be too bad. They live in a world of water and boats, fishing, familiar with silence and solitude. I see a certain comfort with silence in what films I've seen from Norway. The people are not chatterboxes. Surely, Oslo has its punk set trying to be like on tv. I see a Protestant stillness in them, not a stillness from within, but a stillness from culture, like in the American old-time Protestant culture. From earliest childhood, one is taught not to fidget, to sit still, no frivolity, only straight-faced sober demeanor. I think of imagining living among Norwegians. I'll never get there in this lifetime, so I can see these places in films made by some of the more interesting directors I've seen. Erik Poppe of Norway, Ole Bornedal of Denmark, Bille August of Denmark, and a string of satisfying film makers. Since I discovered not long ago the Swedish influence on my nature from the preacher in the church I grew up in, a Swede from Minnesota, I am seeing in films from Helsinki, Stockholm, Copenhagen and Oslo, that I feel very much at home among the Scandinavian people. I'm loving my tour of Scandinavia through some of the finest films I've ever seen.