GRAFFITI ART TODAY

air bellows outdoor art museum

Saw another documentary today about graffiti artists called BOMB IT. It concerned the people who paint what we associate with graffiti, signatures in spray paint, names written in ornate paintings like on the sides of NY subways recent in the past. Evidently, the city has found a way to wash the paint from exterior and interior walls. It followed the people doing this graffiti, largely thugs, though sometimes just outsiders, who are bullied by the thugs. Some of it is gang related. Some is beautiful and some is hideous. The filmmaker went through NY and LA, then to London, Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, Tokyo, Sao Paolo, to look at the graffiti art in these places. In LA, a man has taken it on himself to take a bucket of paint and a roller to graffiti on walls and dumpsters in his neighborhood. When one appears, he covers it. He found when he covers them up, the graffiti people go someplace else. The people doing the graffiti do it as an act of defiance, by their own admission, outsiders, people who want to get back at society. They call it a war. They are "bombing" society. They make a good point with billboards everywhere, ugly, advertising junk. Some of them say what they are doing is beautiful, some say it is meant to be ugly. I'm of both minds about it. Some of it is beautiful and some of it is ugly. I have to say I agree with the city of New York for washing off the graffiti. Their reasoning was that it made the subways look gang infested, made them into frightening places. The graffiti covering everything, inside and outside, does have a threatening association. I concur. The subway cars without the graffiti do feel safer. And I have to say the man in LA cleaning up his neighborhood had a better looking area than parts where graffiti was on the sidewalks, lampposts, windows, cars. This kind of graffiti is largely an aggressive sharp stick in the eye to the society that shut them out by way of poverty. 

air bellows outdoor art museum

I came away from this one feeling dirty, like I needed a shower. One I saw a couple weeks ago, called, BEAUTIFUL LOSERS, concerned graffiti artists who wanted to do interesting visuals with graffiti and it bloomed for them into an art form. It was punk style. These kids, too, were outsiders, though not so much from poverty and gang neighborhoods. They were outsiders because they could not find it in themselves to be fake enough to fit in. It appears all the graffiti is about saying, I AM. I found Beautiful Losers inspiring in a creative, artistic way. I found Bomb It more or less depressing. I was glad when it was over. I don't deny those people and I don't say they're invalid. I say they are as valid as any. It's just that they failed to satisfy my personal taste. When I in late teens, I'd have wanted to be right there with them, defacing, vandalizing, "bombing" the society I resented. I believe I'd have gone the way of the punkers who thought up clever things to say and illustrate, not in-yer-face assaults. Anger has its place in art, and I'm all for artistic expression of anger, a legitimate human experience that is universal; therefore, belonging in art. Some of the expressions of anger were beautiful, things I'd like to have on walls around where I live. However, to have one is to have many, and too many gets boring immediately. I have to agree with the artists in Sao Paolo, who said, look around at the city. It's ugly everywhere you look. They use colors and big graffiti to liven the place up, to add the people's touch. I came away from it without judgment. I can see the beauty in it and I can see the offensive in it. Like the kid in Sao Paolo said, the city is ugly anyway. If you see the graffiti as ugly, what's a little more ugly? If you see the graffiti beautiful, it enhances the ugly city. 

air bellows outdoor art museum

I am happy that the graffiti in the county is localized to one spot, and that spot is one mile from my house. All I have to do is take the Parkway and drive through the tunnel under the road. The walls were bare cement all the way along, then one year one kid spray-painted something, then another and another and soon the whole place was covered. The authorities painted over it. Another round of graffiti covered the painted surface in a short time. People that didn't approve would call the Parkway and say, "Why don't you do something about it!" The authorities painted it over again, and it came right back. One of my neighbors I'd have thought better of, caught a kid painting in there and turned him in, got him in trouble. To pay for his crime, the kid was forced to paint the whole interior of the tunnel, essentially put down a bare canvas. Another round of graffiti came. I took pictures of these different surfaces over time. Fortunately, since the withdrawal of maintenance funding for the Park Service by the republicans over the last 35 years, the authorities have not been painting over the graffiti. It is finally having a chance to evolve, layer on layer, to grow and be multi-leveled, colors on top of colors, all of it random, a living work of spontaneous Dada art. Yes, I have added to it. The black line around the big blue A is mine. I took a can of black paint and just highlighted a few colors. Didn't want to assert self onto it so much as add to it, give it a touch that was mine, a few lines in the whole, to participate. Years ago, in the early nineties, I wrote on it in yellow JANES ADDICTION RULES. Right away, somebody came along and painted a black line through it and wrote SUCKS in black over RULES. I loved it. Markings were put on top of it over time and eventually it disappeared under layers of new markings. 

air bellows outdoor art museum

I love about the tunnel that it constantly changes. It changes so fast through the summer months, it's new every time I drive through. I drive slow and look at both sides, sometimes stop and study it or take a few pictures when I have camera. I park outside it and go in on foot with camera to get as many pictures as I want. Invariably, a car comes through. Women look at me and smile uncertainly. Men look at me like I'm a fool. I don't give a shit. Its got nothing to do with them. It surprises me every time I hear somebody rant about how the kids oughta be stopped. I don't don't even go there. It can't be stopped unless you want to keep armed guards there around the clock. Paint over it and it comes back. I recall a time in my early years here when litter was out of control really bad. Periodically, I would take a walk around the three mile circuit of Waterfall Road and Air Bellows Gap Road carrying four big trash bags. I'd walk and fill one, leave it in place, walk and fill another, leave it in place, and fill another, leaving it in place, then drive around the circuit and throw the bags in the back of my truck for the dump. That's how I took care of litter. Some people from Vermont lived here a short time. They complained to me one day about all the litter, how the people doing it need to be stopped. I said, How? Well they oughta be. I said, You don't like it, pick it up and take it to the dump. They thought that a ridiculous solution. They wanted somebody punished. When it's that pervasive, it's not one person. It's a belief system. You have to change the belief system. Wish you luck. Unable to change a belief system, I accept graffiti as an artistic expression in a society devoid of aesthetic appreciation.

air bellows outdoor art museum

photos by tj worthington

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IT EXISTS FOR ITSELF

air bellows outdoor art museum

My automatic pilot has been set on slow today. Real slow. Unto stopped. Started out getting a few things done, like preparing two new surfaces with gesso toward painting, and viewing videos from the Hillbilly Show toward putting them together in sequence. Like everything else in my life, I'm proceeding not knowing what I'm doing. An artist friend from the past told me he liked about painting that every painting is fresh, he's never done it before. Every painting is first time. Always starting from inexperience. Figuring everything out along the way, a step at a time. It's constant learning that doesn't seem like learning. It's learning by doing, by experience, the best teacher. I like that about making art objects, too. I'm working on a series of abstract, single color surfaces using plywood with a piece of corrugated cardboard glued to it, the whole surface one color. A little earlier, I mixed a color I like for the next one, a kind of rust color. If I were giving them titles, I'd call it Entropy. I'll number them rather than name them. I don't want to make up names for them, like Marakesh, something that sounds pretty and has zero connection to the piece. I'd rather number them as completed and let the number be the name. I don't like Untitled for a title, either. Numbers are good. The word Seven for a title of something unnameable beats calling it Portofino, something exotic. The number has relevance to the piece in its order. I want to see the progression from one piece to the next and see after twenty how they have changed, each one a step along the way of changes from one to the next. 

5 by tj worthington

I like painting like this. It is akin to painting by not painting. I was feeling like figurative painting was like coloring books, painting inside the lines. I live in a place where there is no art market. No matter how nicely I try to make a painting, it only exists for itself. That's cool. I'm happy with that. Since this is the case, the painting only exists for itself, then I want to paint in a way there is no chance anybody will buy anything, even at yard sale prices. Wouldn't want one on their wall. At least in this time, I want my paintings to have no interest outside myself. I don't want them taken seriously. I want to do what I want to do right now, totally without regard for even feedback. I've become enchanted with a single color slathered on with a palette knife in random swipes of the blade leaving no patterns. The only pattern is the shape of the the plywood, so far rectangular, and the shape of the cardboard glued to the board, so far rectangular in different sizes. The raised cardboard piece takes a life of its own, a line of light around two sides and a line of shadow around the other two sides. A rectangle of light and shadow framing the painted cardboard that becomes a subject just by the association of being framed. I like the surface of corrugated cardboard too. I lay the paint on thick, use a large amount of paint, slashing strokes of the palette knife all over it, spreading the paint with only purpose being covering the gessoed surface without aesthetic consideration. One progression I'm seeing already, the first ones were done in basic colors, and quickly changed to mixed colors. I found a rust color today and will apply rust color to the next one I lay the paint on tomorrow. They're about color. I search until I find a color I love. That will be the next one. 

6 by tj worthington

Perhaps I might have made this leap out of everything I'd done before, that's for sale into making things I don't want to sell. When I do a show of them, they'll all be NFS, not for sale. That eliminates thinking up prices for them. Or maybe I could do something radical like put ten dollars on each one. Wouldn't that be a riot. Some actually might sell. And all the artists around would hate me for setting a new low standard. If I want to get rid of them, I might do that. And I might not want to get rid of them. Might want to hang onto them, keep the series as a unit. That's kind of high sounding. I don't want to do that. I haven't even finished the series, so I'm not even going to conjecture what to do with them. Their purpose is to make works to my aesthetic satisfaction with intent that only a few will like them and of these few, none will buy one. I may have found it. Totally private painting, something I want to do that turns me on, and me only. Surely they will resonate with a few others, and that's how I would want it. NFS eliminates the aggressive statement as question: You want money for that? No I don't want money for it. I want it to exist as itself, something I made for myself that suits my aesthetic sense without regard for anyone else's. It's the only way I can find my own aesthetic expression. All that went before led, like stepping stones, to this place. I don't like the art market world. I am looking for my own aesthetic vision independent of marketing values, independent of expectation, independent of it being called a piece of shit. This is the most freeing approach I've found working visually. I've let the belief I needed to sell things hold me back from doing what is happening now. That's ok. Everything in its time. Now is the time for painting totally for my own eye. 

4 by tj worthington

I have found great freedom in writing by keeping this almost-daily journal as blog going without regard for market, for selling it, for hoping to make money. It is for itself. It, too, exists for itself. I feel like my life exists for itself, is not about money. Seems like my visual aesthetic expression is best and freest done when no money is in the purpose, even anti-money the purpose. I see in the mind's eye the Air Bellows Outdoor Art Museum, the tunnel that goes under the Blue Ridge Parkway at the end of Air Bellows Gap Road. Completely free expression for the teens in the county who want to do some spray can graffiti art someplace. It has been several years of layer upon layer of new additions sprayed on top of what's already there. It has become a beautiful experience to drive through. I creep through, looking at both sides. I love about it that it has no single mind creating it. It is multiple mind input, spontaneous markings saying, I-was-here, hundreds of them sprayed on the collage of other people's markings made without aesthetic regard, random colors and lines covering every square inch of the surface. I see unselfconscious random splatterings. A conscious mind applying each color and line, while the whole has no theme but the individual markings made without regard for others around or under them. A totally receptive surface. It just happens as it happens. Every drive through it, I discover new shapes and lines in new colors. The only art gallery in the area and it new every time, changing, growing, organic, just one mile from where I sit. I like where my visual art is going with no intent to sell. I like writing almost daily with none of my motivation being money or to get ahead.   

air bellows outdoor museum of art

photos by tj worthington

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FIRST TEACHING FROM OLD MAN TOM

air bellows outdoor art museum

I found my first notebook/journal from the time of arrival in the mountains. It's a spiral bound school notebook that covers the time of transition from city to mountains, 3-12-76 to 3-30-77. I've looked around in it, read a few pages. It covers the first complete winter. I was reading forgotten experiences. The dreams in that time were horrendous nightmares. Much old going away, much new coming in. I want to see my thoughts about the people I was becoming acquainted with. Old man Tom was the same age I am now. I knew him fourteen years, he died almost twenty-five years ago. In the time of knowing Tom, he was the most interesting person in my life. I was a pallbearer for Tom and swore off it, would never do it again. My arm still feels his weight and the grief. I didn't think it would hit me so hard when Tom died at 86. I went to the funeral home the day before the funeral. Sat and wept for half an hour, was so bad somebody came from the back and handed me a box of Kleenex. At funeral next day I thought I had my tears all cried out. Harold, the funeral director, placed me on a bench behind some people I went to church with, Tom's brother's church. First thing, the two rows in front of me stood up and started singing. They sang three songs, Amazing Grace the last one, songs by Tom's request. I leaned forward and let the tears flow. They made a puddle on the floor between my feet. I was chosen as one of six to carry the casket to the car and later from car to grave. Standing next to Tom's grave and casket was about more than I could take any way but in silence. A niece of his began jabbering some gossip questions and I had to control myself, make myself not say, Show some respect. I've been to his grave a few times, but don't like it. I see a nasty old skeleton in rags and can't get the image out of my mind. This always happens when I go to visit somebody's grave. I wonder, What the hell am I doing here? There's nothing here. I have memory; that's where he lives.

 

air bellows outdoor art museum

 

Found an entry in the notebook from a week before the permanent move to mountains. I was here for a weekend, brought a pickup load, wanted to see and feel the place that stayed in the front of my mind, the mystery of the unknown. The day of the final drive to the mountains was October 30, 1976. I found this entry from a week before the move, after a conversation with old man Tom. I call him old man Tom, because that's what everybody called him. It's how he was known, and it was how I thought of him. The scene is him in his pale ivory colored Chevy pickup that looked like it had been through a demolition derby, had never been washed. His elbow sticking out as he rests his arm on the truck's door at the open window. Khaki work clothes and dark brown hat with brim all the way around. Tom was thin and walked like a stork. The corners of his mouth had a permanent brown stain from "backer." His eyes were the pale blue of a winter sky. They were a bit unsettling, they looked so cold. My entry for October 24: Advice from Tom Pruitt: The proper way to wear insulated boots is to warm your feet and put the boots on. This is to warm the inside of the boots. You take them off and warm your feet again, then put the boots back on. Your feet will be warm all day. Tom said, "After I thought about that awhile, I could see the reason in it." Tom talking about the cows: He said you have to talk to them softly. When they are sold and bought they travel in trucks to strange places, get shuffled around at auctions with people all around them. By the time they get to the farm, they've been shuffled around so much they're afraid of people. He said if you give them sweet grain they begin to trust and like you. They will come to you when you walk through the pasture rather than run from you or attack. He said be gentle with them. He said he can drive his truck right into the herd and they won't run away.

 

 

air bellows outdoor art museum

 

Earlier this evening hearing the NPR news at about ten minutes to six, the news guy was talking about some reprehensible white male behavior by two yoyos in some Yankee city and called them hillbillies. My back went up. I thought, Hillbillies? You mean city-slickers, city boys like you. Don't be comparing ignorant city behavior to mountain people you know nothing about. I was thinking, what else can he say? Every other derogatory term is off limits by way of political correctness. White man hillbillies are ok to use for demeaning examples. It's white man the non-prejudiced people are prejudiced against. At first, it grated my nerves. But I remembered: it keeps them away. The more ignorant the flatlanders think the hill people are, all the better if it keeps them away. Wrong Turn North Carolina is even worse than Wrong Turn West Virginia. They say the way you know the toothbrush was invented in West Virginia is anyplace else it would have been called a teethbrush. One thing I and other hillbillies like about this Depression we've been in since year 2000, it put an end to tourism. The local Chamber and a women's club of white middle-class women from Florida and the suburbs of North Carolina cities, who gather in a club to get to know people, think up cosmetic ways to make Sparta attractive. They are a whole chapter unto themselves, the busy dwarves that never do anything. They get their pictures in the paper and pat each other on the back, getting credit. Now the flatlanders can't afford the gas for a drive to the mountains to tell them ignernt hillbillies they don't know nothin. We've got more brilliant flatlanders now than we can stand. The mountain people don't mind people from the suburbs moving here to be in the exurbs, if they could show a little respect. Unfortunately, the people coming in here from outside have spent their lives watching television and know nothing of respect. They look down on the toothless illiterate they see in everybody. They're so high up the mountain people don't even see them.

   

air bellows outdoor art museum 

 

Can't say I knew much about respect, myself, in the first years. I learned gradually the importance of respect in mountain culture. Diplomacy I learned in the mountains. It is a world of diplomatic decorum in conversation between mountain people. I took to it happily, liked living among people who regarded one another diplomatically. It is the first thing I see when I get in a city. Many times in a city I am tempted to say, If you lived where I live, you'd have quit talking like that in first grade. You'd have had your ass kicked until you shut your damn mouth. In the mountains, a lot of people have short tempers, and you don't always know who it is, though you mostly do. You don't provoke anybody. You don't disrespect anybody, ever, unless you're ready for a fight that could turn into a gunfight really fast. You don't get away with calling a man a son of a bitch; that's slandering his mama, and she aint got nothin to do with whatever the problem at hand may be. Much of this tradition in the culture, being respectful of others and diplomatic, comes from history, the old days, the old ways, not very far back in time when every man carried a gun for hunting and protection. These mountains were wild for a long time in the old days. About all the men drank. Many of them had short tempers. You walk softly among drunk short-tempered men quicker with their guns drunk than sober. The diplomacy that became a way of life stays with the culture now that the men are not drinking so much anymore or carrying guns. They have access to one right away, but most often are not carrying. I like the diplomacy in the culture. Thought I'd look through the notebooks I kept in the early years. Different notations trigger memories. Old man Tom always carried a .32 revolver in his belt in front when he walked into a pasture with a bull. He told me about bulls and I observed what he said to be true. You might think one is calm and tame, think nothing of it. One day you're unsuspecting and you better look out. Bulls are not predictable. Looking back to the days of slinging a scythe through briar patches, briars raking across my face. It's the best way to get rid of them without using chemicals. Cut them back a couple years in a row and they don't return. There was a time Tom seemed so timeless, so outside time, it was not conceivable there would be a time without Tom. He stayed in place all his life and the world changed around him.    

 

air bellows outdoor art museum

 

 

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LENDING A HAND

 

 

all images the air bellows outdoor museum of art

The theme song of my life sang in the front of my mind today every time I settled and relaxed. This world is not my home, I'm just a-passin through. If heaven was not my home, Oh Lord what would I do? This heaven that is my home is here, now, my real self, which I have a feeling is opening itself slowly, more quickly in this time of the life than before. It has to do with secure in myself, in who I am, in my own validity as an individual whether treated like a criminal by law enforcement or thought too well of by people who don't know me. I value individual rights, probably because I was taught it all the way through school as American freedom and liberty. The rough edges I'm experiencing in this time of the life is seeing the tightening down of laws and attitudes. The people running things now were schooled by a generic educational system that went by true or false, multiple choice. It's like in school all the time in our lives now. Make a mistake and you lose points, get a bad grade. We're so hyper detail oriented now as a society because our education is about memorizing details. A head full of details is what we call knowledge. It's definitely not wisdom. After sixteen years of school, my head amounted to a trivial pursuit game. Would John Berryman be:  a) symbolist poet, b) beat poet, c) confessional poet, d) concrete poet? True or false: Herman Melville wrote The Tropic of Cancer.

As an individual who has lived in this body awhile, long enough there comes a time when going on out looks like the best way to go. We are souls with bodies. Take off the body like taking off clothes for a shower. Shake that old skin loose, wiggle out of it. It's hard for ego to conceive of nonexistence, hard for mind, too. By nonexistence I mean without the body, thinking of the body as existence. But I question it being that narrow. It's the soul with a body we call existence. The soul without the body also "exists," if it can be said that spirit exists. I'm inclined to think it does. Seems like the spirit would be the core of existence. The issue that bothers me about living so long is the tightening down. It's come to the place we need a filing cabinet in the house, a tall one. The computer has tightened us down in an advanced way. The society all around me is tightening down like a plumber's wrench twisting a bolt with intent that it will never come loose. Over the years this progression has been the way of American society, I've been loosening myself from the belief systems that go with making money, allowing my own flow. My human flow is slower than the pace of keeping up with all around me. Withdraw further inward. Stay home more. Paint more. Read more. Work on projects at home. I don't understand the world around me. And don't want to.

I like living in a rural community where an awful lot of people like their neighbors and even speak well of them. There is always gossip, but I've come to see gossip as another ingredient in the glue that holds a community together. The people of this county I know look to others with an open readiness to lend a hand whenever needed. Last week, some people from Winston-Salem walking to the waterfalls parked in a place they did not know was soggy ground after much rain. Stuck. I was appealed to for a shovel. I stood around and talked with them and didn't do anything. When they came out of the fix, gratitude was heaped on me, and I was thinking, for what? All I could say was, "It's what we do in the mountains." There was never a thought of inconvenience. Somebody appeals for help, you go do what you can. It's a silent mountain code, one that nearly everybody lives by, simply because it is a belief in the culture, mother's milk it might be called, and daddy's knots on your head, you give help where help is needed. As long as I've lived here, it has been a truth that when something happens to your car, you're on the side of the road unable to go, the first pickup that passes will stop and ask if you need help. The population is now half people from city suburbs who don't know about the code. Those old cultural attributes of the mountains are specific to the mountain people.

 

 

 

In the coffee shop yesterday, somebody asked why I live here, meaning it. My mind went empty. I couldn't even imagine compressing it into a phrase, even a paragraph. It's my entire being that wants me here. This is my home that was waiting to be found. It was waiting for me, the old Air Bellows school house, live-in graduate school. Move in and learn. I didn't say any of that. All I could say was it's the home of my soul. To explain beyond that would have to be at a table with some good liquor to sip and a lot of time. Nobody who asks such a question ever wants to hear the story of its inevitability. He wanted to know if I knew somebody here or had relatives here. It didn't compute with him that my path led me here. I didn't know anybody. Didn't have any idea of the culture I had moved into. I set out to learn mountain culture from my school house of one. When it comes to ideals for education, seems like a school of one is the ideal. Learn by experience. Learn by knowing people. Learn by working. Learn by listening. I don't know even close to what can be known about mountain culture, but I know enough to respect the culture itself and the people who live it. My respect is such that I aspire to many of their values. I don't have it by mother's milk, but I have it by grandmother's love and grandfather's blood. This is the place where my soul is satisfied. This is the place where I have learned to have a heart affection for my neighbors.

 

 photos by tj worthington

 

 

 

 

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I NEVER DREAMED I WOULD

air bellows outdoor art museum

Had to go to town today to get a prescription filled. Of course, it had to be faxed about and no return fax had yet come after an hour. I hear that so frequently it's hard to keep a straight face when told. Just another weird aspect of living in this world. We learn when we're children not to get mad or worked up over such. It's like shooting the ocean. I just work here. Management works for the corporate boss. Corporation headquarters are in Milwaukee. You're welcome to call. Like all such inconveniences in our everyday lives, we pass them off as nothing. Just another learning experience: don't expect, ever. Now I have to drive to town tomorrow, after calling first to see if the fax came back. Maybe I will. Maybe I won't. You can't do this without doing this other thing first, but before you do that, there is this over here that you have to sign and send off and wait for the return at the whim of people that don't care. We're living Kafka at the same time we're living Orwell. We're playing The Trial and The Castle in Animal Farm. All pigs are created equal. The first 42 years of my life, 1984 was in the future. Now it's 28 years in the past. It's curious to see a date so distant in the past that was unimaginably far away in the future when I was 7. I remember in the 6th grade finding it unimaginable I'd live to see the year 2000. That year too has passed through the present in the hourglass between the future and the past.

Waiting for the prescription, between turning in the canisters and picking up the new ones, I went to the coffee shop to see who was there and to swill down some warm brew. Looking forward to one of Selma's scones was my motivation to make the trip to town less utilitarian. The Cubans coming to this county are offering us some wonderful food in nice restaurants that are affordable. A lot of people are snooty toward the Cubans coming to the county, but I'm reminded of that quotation I see on facebook sometimes about disliking something you don't know anything about being a good example of ignorance. That's not near the exact words; it's memory of my interpretation of its meaning. I can't turn my back on good people just because their family heritage is a Spanish speaking country. Lord have mercy. My heritage is exiled English Quaker, a man of constant sorrow, and hillbillies from there on. A couple of generations in the city didn't eliminate any of the hillbilly, and that's a good thing. When I discovered mountain culture, I discovered the home of my soul. So somebody else is a kid growing up, suddenly you have to leave with mommy and go to America where they talk another language and you're a stranger, don't know any English, you're supposed to be in school and you don't know what any of it is about. You do the best you can, the momentum makes you conscientious, you do well and people accuse you of living on drug money when what you're doing is getting out of south Florida for a better place to live.

I never dreamed I would become somebody who frequents a coffee shop. I'm reminded of my grandfather in Kansas City going to Tony's bar, showing off his four year old grandson sitting on a stool at the bar next to grandpa. Tony's was grandpa's hangout. I have that experience now in a coffee shop. I go in, sit down, whoever is there is whoever is there. I never imagine who might be there. I like to go in and see who's there. It's always friendly company. I've seen a few that were not, but only in subtle ways they didn't think showed. A cluster of four, Joe, Tim, Bob and Guy were actively engaged in conversation. I gave them the nod of recognition, sat down and told Selma I need a scone. I never dreamed I would one day walk into a coffee shop and need a scone. The deal is, I never had such high hopes for myself. It had never occurred to me before Selma's coffee shop that I could enjoy having my fill of Kenyan coffee and a freshly in-house made scone with people I enjoy talking with. I did like a kid skipping rope with a kid at each end twirling two ropes at once, listening to what they were talking about, subjects we often talk about in new forms, feeling the rhythm of the 4-way active conversation, eventually fell into the rhythm and jumped in with whatever I felt worth saying. Every one of these guys I enjoy listening to and talking with, individually and in group. They're good people and I don't mean pious good. Selma is a good one to jump in and join the conversation. It's lively. I never dreamed I would see a scene such as this could take place in Sparta. It's like something out of a foreign movie. And sometimes I need subtitles.

I never get to spend enough time talking with Joe until today. I like hearing what he has to say on whatever the subject of the moment may be. We tend to survey what we gather from our various news sources and attempt to find a balanced way of seeing whatever it is. I suspect that's the thread that runs through all of us, looking for a balanced point of view. When Bob brought up republicans in Congress, like what's behind what they're doing, I said racism and he said no. We didn't argue. I'm saying when we have black this and that on television and gay this and that on television, all of it sympathetic, it doesn't mean the people not watching those particular shows, the majority, are over racism. Half our white population is racist. It wasn't long ago it was all racist. This is, after all, the South. Racism is not specific to the South. In the western states they hate the Native Americans, their version of the N word. It's only about having an other to hate. It's about egoism, me first, everybody else last. Unfortunately, that's what American individualism has come to in the post-1980 age of Narcissus. I don't think this means it has changed. It's always been like this. Denial is not as easy as it used to be. Television keeps us thinking everybody is prosperous and happy with an explosion on every corner and law enforcement keeping us safe from fill-in-the-blank. This was not what we talked about in the coffee shop today. It's my own digression. Though this is the sort of thing we talk about.

We all wound down at the same time, it seemed like, and all of us went out the door at the same time. It was at least an hour in good company. It is refreshing to be with people who are paying attention to the context of their lives, attempting to understand that which cannot be understood. It doesn't matter if it's about the Marx Brothers or Tibetan Shamanism, I enjoy good conversation between people who can listen as well as talk. This bunch today was a good balance of listeners and talkers. Everyone was heard and everyone felt free to speak. Bob had to go off on a cell phone journey to a corner to talk, the only cell phone interruption. And we didn't even talk about him while he was gone. By this time in my life I have found a good balance of people I know. About half my associations are with mountain people and about half with people here, like me, from other places. I like that I am comfortable flowing freely from one culture to the other. It is two different cultures. The early at least 20 years, maybe 25, I felt like I was on a bridge between the culture I came from and the culture I'm in here in the mountains. I remember a time ten or more years ago when I felt like I'd set foot on land on the mountain side of the bridge. Since then I'm of the culture in my heart as much as anyone born here. Now, it's not a pull this way and that, wavering between the two cultures. Now that I'm in one and committed to it, I find associations with people from off the mountain easier than ever.

air bellows outdoor art museum

 

 

 

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AIR BELLOWS OUTDOOR ART MUSEUM

The Blue Ridge Parkway has been closed along the Air Bellows section a couple years for extensive repairs. This hasn't stopped the local teenage artists. The urge to art goes on. I went to see the tunnel through the overpass just slightly south of the Air Bellows Overlook. For many a year, narry a spot of paint had been put on the walls inside the tunnel that is as long as the road is wide. One year in the 80s somebody put some spray can markings on a wall. In a very short period of time, a summer, the whole interior was covered with names, sayings, words, squiggles, whatever. It became more and more interesting as it filled up, then layers on top of layers. Somebody in Air Bellows ratted on a guy he caught spraying in there. Parkway made him paint a solid gray color on top of the art work that was becoming more interesting with time. All that did was start a new canvas. More colors accumulated and more words, cartoon figures, professions of love and lust, all of it spontaneous and more or less random. Like the subway cars in New York, this open-air museum is site-specific, free admission, open 24-365.

The walls in the tunnel have been painted over by Parkway authority several times by now. Every time it starts getting really good, when several layers have made what I call Pollock Punk, a layer of dark brown or dark gray paint returns it to empty canvas. It's not many days before words and images begin again. In the early years several images like spray-can profiles or cartoon face, a stick figure. In the recent years the images have faded away. It's almost all words now with the occasional image, like the man with the watering can. I've been concerned that the Parkway maintenance people might feel compelled to paint over this most recent surface that has been on there 3 or 4 years in the growing. I wanted to get some pictures of it's colors before they paint over it again. I'd like to see the Parkway let it go and never paint over it. They may be responding to calls from Air Bellows people who hate the art in the tunnel. They complain every time they see it. They hate the Museum of Modern Art too, so what do their complaints mean? Nothing.

I say, Allow art. Rural America has no contemporary art museums; nobody is interested in art except for discount-store prints. There's not even curiosity about art. Television honors no art except occasional PBS for the few. When a painting by a dead artist goes for 150 million at auction, everybody complains that a work of art can have such value. Like eco-philosopher Henryk Skolimowski said, Life is short, art is long. Only a very few historians know who the bankers were in Renaissance Florence, but the artists of the time and place are well known unto this day. Teenagers with all their hormonal activity, not far from childhood, in the time of enormous ego development, the kids need moments to express self, to say in public, I AM. That's what these spray-can scrawlings are saying on the tunnel walls, each one in his and her own way, thus making it infinitely varied. When I stand in the tunnel with the camera looking at the two walls, the colors juxtaposed without conscious placement show me the Dada ideal in art, an absolutely spontaneous Dada expression. People who don't know each other write their names and statements on top of other expressions as if they weren't there. I feel like it is an important spot in a community to have a place where teenagers can make their spontaneous art expressions, a place chosen by them high on the mountain where they can shout for all the world to hear: I AM.

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