JACK STABLE RAMBLE

Much of the day I was making steps toward emptying a shed I'd built in 1977 out of boards from an old shed that had been torn down. Initially, it kept chickens for ten years. They nested in there and slept in the trees. One night when they slept in the shed a coon got in and killed a couple of them and they never slept in there again. They slept on a white pine branch close enough to the ground they could easily fly to it, but out of reach of night predators. Eventually, so many dogs came into the area that I couldn't keep chickens anymore. I liked to let them run free. I threw grain to them in the mornings and they pecked in the meadow for grasshoppers and every kind of bug they eat. I've kept scrap wood in the shed since the chickens. I'm a natural born junkyard man. I can't throw anything away unless there is nothing left that can be done with it. Over the years I've cut things out of plywood with a jigsaw, like a life-sized fiddler, a seven foot long guitar, things like that. I've kept the scraps. I have ten foot long one by ones, two twelve foot long dowels, a wooden barrel missing top and bottom. Posts of various sizes, blocks of wood. Two plywood circles 4 foot diameter and neighbor Tom Pruitt's mailbox with post. A few years after Tom died the road was paved. The bulldozer pushed the box and post out of the ground and treated it like trash. I brought it home. It's rusted really bad, has remains of paint in places and two bullet entry holes on one side and exit holes on the other side. I've aimed for years to plant it in the ground somewhere around the house for old-time memory. The post is old dry wood roughly nailed together. I call it found art.

 

 

Making the chicken house into a stable. Cutting out the wall that faces the meadow, making half of it an open doorway and the other half a wall about half way up, leaving the upper half open. It's a good size for two donkeys and a foal. I already know when Jack gets his Jeanette and they have a little donkey, I will be inseparable from the little one. It will be my pet from the start. It will be born in the same place my cats were born. It feels a little bit funny that in this time when I'm wrapping up this lifetime to suddenly have something I've wanted all my life, a donkey. It just came to me. Wanting a donkey was something it never occurred to me to tell anybody, because I believed it a hopeless urge like wanting a car I can't afford. And when I needed my old man car, the Toyota pickup burned up and died. I had the use of this 93 Buick that is an excellent car and two weeks later it became mine. Insurance money from the truck gave me the money to bring the Buick back to its potential after years of desperately needing a tuneup and taillights and a new headlight, new brakes, new tires. It took quite a bit to bring it back. Ever since that visit with the mechanic, it has run to my total satisfaction. It's 20 years old and doesn't use oil. It's a v-6 and evidently as classic a motor as the Chevy Nova slant six. Those Nova motors continue after the car has rusted away. They end up in Third World countries running pumps.

Much of the time driving I'll not listen to music because I like listening to the motor. It's running as close to perfectly as it can in the hands of a non-mechanic. My mechanic is like the guys on the NPR show Car Talk where people call in, tell their car's symptom and these master mechanics with advanced degrees from MIT answer to what the problem is, what it will take to fix it and a ballpark figure of what it will cost. Done in spontaneous Marx Brothers comedy. A few times when I've had something just a little off in the car, I could tell my mechanic (I say my because he is the only one I'll go to) what the car is doing and he goes straight to the problem. He doesn't half fix the car, either. When I drive out of his garage I feel the difference immediately. Chuck Billings is his name. He's in Glade Valley on Osborne Call Road. He's like a dentist, takes care of one appointment after another. I admire his knowledge in a big way. He's the kind of man you can trust as a true human being, too. He plays acoustic guitar with a hillbilly gospel band, Covered By The Blood. I love their name. It could also be a hard-core punk band or gangsta rappers. Musically, Chuck and I are in tune that the Stanley Brothers are the best there ever was, no two ways about it. Oh, I just felt this overwhelming longing to hear Carter Stanley sing. It brings tears just to think about him. Such a superb singer. Ralph Stanley tears up every audience at his shows when he recites The Hills of Home, his memory of Carter, growing up together, making music together. It's one of the wonderful hillbilly tear-jerkin talk songs. It leaves few dry eyes in the audience. To sit in a Ralph Stanley audience is to be among people who live by their hearts having a heart fest.

I'd put on some Stanley Brothers, but then I'd have to stop writing, sit back and listen. The music will do that to me. I can't do anything else and listen to the Stanley Brothers or Ralph Stanley. Even if I wanted to, I'd have a hard time turning off Thomas Mapfumo, whose band is playing now. He's from Zimbabwe. His band is the Blacks Unlimited. Dance club music. He sings in his home language. It's a flow like palm wine music and a lilting reggae, understated vocal, talk-singing. You can hear him on youtube if you're curious. I can listen to it because I can't understand the words. The vocals are the same as an instrument. This is dance music from Harare. It's a sinuous flow with interestingly complex rhythms. I sometimes wonder about how Mapfumo gets along these days. He was the rebel singer in Rhodesia when the blacks ran the white farmers out of the country and took over the farms. Robert Mugabe. The voice of the revolution, it's going to be a better world. Not. Mugabe has bled the country the same way the Banks are bleeding the American people, taking all to self. Mugabe loses every election and won't leave office. Zimbabwe is so incredibly depressed I can't help but wonder how much Mugabe hates the Zimbabwean people. He has 9 PhDs. Of course he deserves keeping the people in the worst kind of poverty. It's his privilege. He's smart. I wonder how Thomas Mapfumo comes to terms with himself for his part in the revolution. I can only imagine him disappointed. But his music hasn't suffered any. His music satisfies my ear like maybe Dvorjak quartets, like recent Bob Dylan projects. Very different music, but similar satisfaction in my ear. Music with a flow that obviously affects my thinking. It's been playing the whole time. I've tried to not get lost in the music, but it happened.

 

 

THE LION OF ZIMBABWE

by morris graves


Friends visiting form Atlanta a few days puts me on schedule timing, something I tend to avoid. I've learned why it is I pay so much more attention to the clock than I need to or want to. I used to live in that world of schedules. It was home for nearly all my life. Like today I am going to the show at the Front Porch at 7, they probably are not. If they decide to go, they want to go to Lowes in Galax and Galax Walmart. I need to get gas. I'm going to suggest we allow an hour for Lowes and Walmart. There are places to eat all over Galax. Gas in Galax has been 20c to 30c less than gas in Sparta. When it's just a few cents difference, I buy gas in Sparta. At the moment it is a big difference between the two, so I buy gas in Galax when I pass through Galax going to Woodlawn.



Last night we watched a Zhang Yimou film, Riding Alone For Thousands of Miles. The title is the name of a traditional Chinese opera. Beautiful film, like everything by Zhang Yimou, one of the more interesting directors in the world. Lars vonTrier of Denmark is another, though his films are entirely different for Zhang Yimou's that are colorful, have powerful emotion, every scene a beauty to behold.
The beauty in this one was the landscape and the feeling. Lars vonTrier is stark as stark gets. His vision of the Greek play MEDEA gave little to no reference to the story. It was mostly looking over barren landscape. His film ANTICHRIST. This one makes no reference to Biblical antichrist, but vonTrier takes us to where the antichrist comes from, within. It's ugly and unforgettable.. The emotional power in his films is intense. Like in Medea, little in it to refer to the play, but the feeling in it is the feeling in the original Medea. Perhaps I link these two directors together as they both take us to places within that make us feel. Zhang Yimou wants us swept away by the beauty of his film. VonTrier wants to make us face matters that disturb us, forcing us to think about something we tend not to think about because we prefer not to.



As I write I'm grooving within to the music of Thomas Mapfumo of Zimbabwe. His band has flowing, complex rhythms. Smooth rhythms of urban dance club music. It's music that can be danced fast or slow to, according to how you feel the rhythms. He is called the Lion of Zimbabwe. Originally, he was a rebel singing in Rhodesia, allied with the black opposition. Freedom, all the rebellion cliches. Then they get their freedom and it's under the boot of Robert Mugabe who took all resources for himself, leaving the people of the country to wither and turn into a criminal society to survive. He did in Rhodesia what the republicans want in USA---run out all races but white, put all the resources in the hands of the rich, let the peasants get by as they can. His attitude from first day to last: fuckem. He took land and resources from white farmers, the ones that gave labor to a major portion of black population. White farmers run out of the country leaves the black people without work, without income.



So Mapfumo's side won. Hooray. The people are as much worse off as Zimbabwe than they were as Rhodesia, like the people in Iraq were much better off under Sadaam Hussein's boot than the boot of American military's indifference, which at least equals Hussein's. Liberation day, American bombs fell from the sky by surprise on Baghdad at night. Killed and maimed a lot of people. So what. We liberated them about like Robert Mugabe liberated the black folks of Rhodesia. Shoot them and liberate them from their bodies. Funny how factory-made bombs from the sky are ok and desireable, yet home-made bombs on the ground are "terrorist," requiring punishment like Nazis did in WW2: You kill one of ours, we kill ten of yours. The Reagan-Bush-Cheney-Rummy Junta has taught me what I needed to know about how the German people gave themselves thoughtlessly over to Fascism in the Nazi time. I saw the American people all around me do the same thing. Now I see Thomas Mapfumo having to swallow his allegiance. It turns out black Africans are more racist than white Americans.



Hearing Mapfumo post-Mugabe I wonder how difficult it is for him as a racist wanting to run the white people out of Africa, to find his support went to an internal force far more sinister than the racism of the white's in Rhodesia. My feeling is that Mapfumo went apolitical. I get the feeling from song titles he's advising the black people to put out Mugabe. It's not going to happen. When it was Rhodesia and he was singing self-righteous dogma calling for overthrow of the white government, I thought him on the right track--hooray for Thomas Mapfumo wanting black rule in an African nation. When his side won, I felt like it was a big day for Mapfumo as he and his band supported the rebellion with rebel music. Now his side is a worse purveyor of universal pain than the white's of Rhodesia. Nothing for them to do but leave the country, go live in Zimbabwean communities in Washington DC, New York, London slums. I've often wondered over the years how Mapfumo feels when he sees the demise of his country in the hands of the rebels he was a musical cheerleader for. My guess is it's a heavy burden for him. But that's a projection of how I think I would feel. We are in very different worlds, so different I can't imagine anything of how he would think or feel but by the song titles translated to English.



This is one of my favorite aspects of African music. I can't understand the lyrics. The singer's voice is another instrument like a horn, guitar or drum, meaning I can hear the music without it pulling at my left brain with lyrics. I can write to you listening to instrumental music, but not vocal. When I don't understand the language, the voice is part of the music. I can use the part of the brain that focuses on language without distraction by language. I may do that more and more, play African music while writing you. This one still took me over. I could write about nothing else while it was playing. I love Mapfumo's lilting rhythms, a flow like water in a stream. I believe I even like his later music better than the rebel music. It has a softer tone that flows, to my ear, better with his music.



*

BLACKS AND WHITES UNLIMITED

and the blacks unlimited



Another day that went by too fast. For some odd reason I sat for 2.5 hours and watched 2012, "the best disaster movie ever," watched it despite recognizing at the beginning I'd seen it. Started watching it being lazy, then continued watching because it was constantly compelling, kept interest rolling. It's not like I'd give it more than 3 stars on the netflix scale of 5. It must have cost a fortune to produce. Special effects. For my taste special effects equals special ed. They're always artificial looking, like ocean waves crashing over the Himalayas: give me a break. Big tsunamis drenched all the earth and the water level presumably rose a very great deal and Africa raised something like a thousand feet, floating like an innertube on the risen water. Whatever. Of course, the kid in it was named Noah. At the start was the notice that it was rated R "for intense disaster sequences." It's a children's movie. Then they rate it so kids can't see it in a theater. Kids can only see it at home after the thrill of the new is gone. I don't try to understand much anymore. Too much is incomprehensible.



From there I painted a bit, then came to the computer and found a Thomas Mapfumo video performing his song Moyo Wango. He's from Zimbabwe. Back when Rhodesia had white rule Mapfumo was a rebel singer, sang about putting out the white government and taking it over by blacks. His band is the Blacks Unlimited. Kinda racist, but he's African, exempt from American middle class morality. Unfortunately when the revolution occurred and the white landowners and government people were killed or run back to Europe, the new government by blacks was headed by a dictator, worse, inept, took everything for himself, dropped the entire country into the worst kind of poverty and unrealistic inflation. Mapfumo as an entertainer survived everything he stood for before it all fell down around him.



What do you do when you struggle for what you believe to be the good of your country and your people, and then it's worse than even possible for it to be? I hope our Supreme Court experienced at least a little remorse for giving the 2000 election to the loser after seeing the mayhem the Bush-Cheney-Rummy triumvirate unleashed on the American people and our democracy, if they care, which I see no evidence of. We're the thick-fingered masses that didn't go to Yale or Harvard. Resistance to Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe is lethal. Mapfumo's music continues to be good music. Real music. Flowing music. It's music that sets the body in motion, head nodding to the rhythm, feet tapping, a kind of swimming in the flow of the smooth rhythm. Mapfumo uses a thumb piano (mbira) in his band. It's a hand-held device played by the thumb, an instrument particular to traditional Zimbabwean music. Electric guitars, drums, horns and dancing girls on stage compose the Blacks Unlimited.



At amazon where I borrowed the above picture I found they had sources for out of print copies of Skeeter & the Skidmarks album, Hubbin It. They also had from Alternate Roots, Tales of Love and Sorrow, Branching Out and Another Dirt Road (expensive prices on this one). Next week Skeeter & the Skidmarks are playing at the Front Porch Gallery. I'll tell some people who go there who have been asking about finding some Skeeter or Alternate Roots cds. Both bands were Willard and Scott's bands. Willard and Scott have been a musical team for a long time, at least 20 years. They make music with as smooth a rhythmic flow as Mapfumo's Blacks Unlimited, just more in a Whites Unlimited sort of way. As poverty tends to bring the music out in people, I wonder about the music in small Zimbabwean towns when they're writhing in the agonies of poverty. The music must be something extraordinary.