AMERICAN MELTING POT

maggie gyllenhaal in wtc

I watched Oliver Stone's film, WORLD TRADE CENTER, last night late. I don't think Stone made this one to be a blockbuster academy award winner, millionaire-making mega film such as JFK or PLATOON. This one goes inward. It is a consciously made story that comes across as a documentary that happened to have cameras in difficult places. It follows the story of 2 NYPA (Port Authority) cops stranded inside the rubble of the collapsed first tower, pinned down, unable to move. Much of the film was them in the dark talking to each other with a distance of about 20 feet between them. Then at their homes, their wives and kids, their reactions to hope against hope.

These two men's stories actually happened. It has elements you don't often see in a serious film, like the Marine who felt a strong compulsion to help, to search for anyone who might have survived. His conviction and single-minded action on it brought the guy in NASHVILLE to mind when his mind was set on assassination. The Marine put on his Marine Corps cammies and joined the effort to rescue survivors. He found another Marine to go with him to search in some unlikely regions of the destruction. He was the one who found the 2 police survivors. At one point, in the home of one of the 2, a woman is found by surprise in the kitchen on her knees praying, a mother. You don't see much of that in movies. In a subtle way, I took it the woman's prayers were such they set the Marine in motion searching where no one else was looking.

The drama in the story seemed to be whether one or both of these guys would make it. I felt like Oliver Stone stepped out there to try something artistically that ran the risk of chasing off the audience looking for eye candy. All the spectacle part that's been on tv so much the Bush-Cheney administration banned it from tv, which kinda makes me wonder, was off-stage. It was the intimately human story of 2 men who survived a most disheartening situation. It took us into the homes of these men. It took us to their inner attics and basements, too, where we watched them wind down to their final things to say, all of which was at home to wife and kids, not to tv news. When they came back to the world, those were the first things they said.

There was a time I'd have seen the movie because Nicholas Cage was in it, but that was so long ago that by now he's like any other Hollywood star whose movies I avoid, like Brad Pitt and Robert Redford. It was the David Lynch film, WILD AT HEART, that made me want to see something else with Cage. It wasn't long before Hollywood offered him more than he could refuse and he became another pretty boy to pose for the camera. I saw Cage in John Woo's FACE OFF with John Travolta, and that was it for either one of them. Neither of their names made me want to see anything with them playing roles. There is the occasional step outside the norm, which Travolta did in PULP FICTION, and perhaps Cage did in WTC. It seemed to me Cage performed as an actor in every scene. He was never a pretty boy. He was dirty and ugly most of the time. He made a memorable character.

Michael Pena was the actor of the other NYPA survivor. I recalled him from CRASH, the Latin guy who made a truly unforgettable and endearing character as the locksmith. His character was a whole human being. Oliver Stone saw Crash too. He put Pena in a leading role with Cage and he was up to it. Again, he created a whole human being. All this was done in a terrifically theater-like manner. These two carried much of the story with just their faces in the dark and their voices. No movement. Just words. It worked. Looking at the art of what they were doing in the film, it was a theatrical tour de force. Looking at the boxoffice in it, all that inaction weakened the boxoffice response. Maggie Gyllenhaal was the actress who played Michael Pena's wife. I'd seen her a few days before in CRAZY HEART. In both films she made a complete human being. She made a character who was individual in both roles. She wasn't just filling in the space and speaking the lines. She made it seem more like a documentary so unselfconsciously performing her roles.

I'd not heard anything about this movie that made me want to see it. I saw it in a big display of $5 movies in the Galax Walmart where I went to find a battery operated wall clock to replace the one that died after at least 20 years. I've learned that in sale bins where just about everything isn't worth a nickel, there is one in there someplace that is hiding and everyone else is missing it. I saw WTC, Nicholas Cage. Nope, not this one. Then I saw Oliver Stone. Stone doesn't make bad movies, and this one is pretty far advanced in his body of work. It didn't have stars on the front nor a notice of thumbs up. Nothing mentioning film festival nominations. Only noting on the front, "a true story," and at the top a line from a critic, "Glorifies that which is best in the American spirit." That's a good way to put it for advertising. It's catchy and seems to make sense. The funny part is, that's actually what it does. American response to emergency transcends racism, politics, belief systems, nationalism. Emergency is the melting pot of Democracy, it seems like Stone is saying, the melting pot illustrated so beautifully by Herman Melville in MOBY DICK, the variety of human hands in the melting pot of whale blubber, kneading out the chunks. In the NYPD the world's races and nationalities are represented. Stone makes particularly American films, and this was another one. I'll watch it again soon with Stone's commentary, hear what he has to say about it.

DIGGING THE WHOLE

jewelweed forest


The sun has set. We are in the gloaming, the light between sunset and dark, a calm, peaceful time of day. Not much breeze. Just enough to make a few leaves move slowly up and down at the end of a thin twig. Tapo is curled up on my reading/watching movies chair. Caterpillar may be outside. She was on the footstool cushion and vanished. It's the time of day she likes to explore in the jungle of jewelweed and ferns, maybe looking for mice. She has become peculiar about what she eats. There's only one kind of catfood she likes now and when I get her nothing but that, she quits liking it. Oh well. I went through enough of that with TarBaby. I do the best I can and if they don't like catfood, then they have my permission to eat whatever they can catch.



I'm enjoying playing mountain gospel music on the radio show more every week. This morning I played several by Wade Mainer, somebody my listeners like almost as much as Ralph Stanley. I have only 1 cd of him, though a few LPs, and the station has nothing by him. I'll see if Sue can put the LPs I have of Wade and Julia Mainer on cd. I like Wade's singing of the Cat Came Back. I thought he was a gonner, but the cat came back. Also played several by the Peaceful Valley Qtet, a local gospel group of 30 years ago, more or less. They sounded good. Played a couple of Ola Belle Reed songs, Ernest & Agnes Joines when they was younguns, a few Carter Family.



The gospel hour and the original hour of traditional music are bleeding together in my mind. I may catch myself playing some gospel in the first hour and some traditional in the 2nd hour, mixing them up at will, possibly to be a permanent way of doing it, mixing them. I see no reason to do otherwise. My listeners love the gospel at least as much as the traditional, and more in a lot of cases. I see no reason to keep them separate. We live our spiritual lives and our everyday lives together. They are woven together to the point they become one. Seems like a good way to go with the music. I like the woven together aspect of it. It's mountain music for mountain people and mountain people love gospel. A lot of gospel songs have powerful meaning.



I believe people who like gospel music like the songs largely because they have meaning that is worth thinking about. One of the first characteristics I found in mountain people is a shared philosophical way of thinking. I don't mean philosophical to mean resignation like it is used so much for, but the original meaning, thinking about life and what's important. In the old days, the man worked the farm alone and the woman did her work largely alone, but for the kids. Farm labor was essentially solitary work in the old days, except for harvest and firewood for winter. The farmers didn't have iPods in the field playing outlaw country. No distractions. Alone with his mind all day every day, the only life he ever knew, the farmer in the Age before electricity preferred silence and absence of distractions. Tom Pruitt could sit and look at his wall all day every day of the winter and never be depressed. It's how he got his thinking done. Like now, I like to take a good drive without radio to get some thinking done.



I like about mixing the gospel and traditional as something to think about regarding the 2 hour show. I see no reason why not and a major reason for it would be that the mountain people I know and the ones listening to the show are a mix of their spiritual lives and their everyday lives, people who say, I suwannee, to avoiding saying, I swear, as Jesus recommended not swearing. Some preachers say Jesus never recommended or suggested anything. He commanded. Everything Jesus said is a commandment. For one thing, Love doesn't command. Another, Jesus with God consciousness knows human beings only pay negative attention to a commandment, brace up against it to the point it becomes something insurmountable. A commandment doesn't allow us the time to think about it and see the good sense in it, which, I believe, is essential to understanding what Jesus was doing, pointing out the Way. Once we catch on to the Way with some experience, we're headed where Jesus is leading us, making our own decisions in accordance with understanding the Way, decisions that don't come back and bite us.



I feel like the traditional (I don't like the word secular) music and the gospel music make up the whole of mountain music, like the example of a bird with 2 wings, the traditional on one side and gospel on the other. The bird can't fly without both wings. Like our left brain and right brain have very different functions and together make the whole. The Eastern part of the world is very different from the Western part of the world. Together they make the whole. I'm convincing myself as I write that this is the way to go. It makes the presentation of the music more like our lives. I'm not one who believes we have church on the one hand and the rest of our lives on the other. It's all interwoven. Our most egoic thoughts are mixed up with our most selflessly motivated thoughts. It's all part of the whole. We are spiritual beings who have to work and deal with money, other people and our own desires. It feels important to me not just to complete the circle, but to circumvent the whole. It feels right. Feels good as a way of looking at it making a whole, and it feels good like it's how we are in our lives. Humming a gospel song at work, while driving, any time of day. Calling it a gospel hour seems to me to separate it from our everyday lives, when I see it as mixed in.



That answers it. Thanks for listening to the thought process. When the threads that make the warp are red and the threads making the woof are yellow, they make orange by pixels. Maybe that says mixing the traditional and the gospel could create an entity independent of either red or yellow. Like the way the music is an entity that occurs when all the musicians are playing together. It seems like something separate from the individual musicians, yet dependent on each one. I like mixing the two different approaches and making a whole of them. They are equally important aspects of mountain music. It used to be they were held strictly separate. The fiddle was said to be the devil's instrument, because it played for dances and dancing was a sin as bad as playing cards and drinking. That absolutist thinking is fading away and the mix seems to be the way we're going in this day and time.

SCOTT & WILLARD

scott freeman and willard gayheart

Another music event tonight at the Front Porch, Woodlawn, VA. Scott Freeman and Willard Gayheart made music together. Scott's daughter, Dori, sang 2 songs beautifully. Scott and Willard play at the Blue Ridge Music Center on the Parkway Mon-Thu, 10-3. I must get out there to see them one day this week. They've been making music together 20 or more years. Scott and Willard were playing music together as Skeeter & the Skidmarks when Scott got to know his wife, Jill, not knowing she was Willard's daughter. One of the songs they played tonight was Jill's Waltz, an instrumental composition of Scott's.

Willard makes pencil drawings of musicians and mountain people of all ages and generations. The walls of the gallery are covered with Willard's drawings. He has prints made of them, signed and numbered, goes around to different town festival type things with a booth. He has a lot of his prints out in people's houses all over the country. Just about everyone knows his name in relation to his pencil drawings, and just about only musicians know he's an excellent musician, songwriter and singer. Willard can pick a guitar too. He throws off on himself, he only plays rhythm, he can't do much. He doesn't strum. Willard picks rhythm. Once in awhile he'll go off and play lead for a short spell and he can really do it. I like watching Willard's left hand. He pushes the strings down and releases them, giving him the sound he likes. He's been playing a Henderson guitar for 20 years. I watched him changing chords with every lick, not even making an effort to go fast. He sits relaxed as somebody doing Barr chords and strumming Louie, Louie in a bar the millionth time. Willard's fingers make chords as easily as a thought. He doesn't even think about them any more. They just go where they need to be next. Scott knows Willard is a good picker, too.

I noticed Willard's picking at Alternate Roots shows. I think I went to 15. The last one was their last show, and it happened at the Carter Fold, Hiltons VA, on the AP Carter Highway just off 58. If I remember correctly, which, chances are, I probably do not. Jean and I went. It's all right. It makes a good story. I like that part of the mountains, the Clinch Mountains. I noticed there were seldom any new houses anywhere in that area. I thought of it as the next place to go when this region is overrun with suburbanites. They'd follow me there, too. I'll not blaze a trail there to draw attention to it. One thing the mountain people like about the flatlanders believing a lot of the nonsense they believe about hillbillies, it keeps them away. Hooray. No better place for them than someplace else. I'd driven quite a ways before I noticed there were no new houses. Though maybe the new houses were away from Hwy 58, off in subdivisions with views.

Willard playing with the band just stood there at the mic for the guitar and picked rhythm. Didn't look like he was doing anything fancy, and he wasn't. He was picking rhythm. Relaxed. He would sing several songs in a concert, never miss a lick on his guitar. Willard's fingers are loaded with subtleties dealing with the strings. Like I said, he's had a Henderson guitar 20 years. That's how long ago he outgrew a Martin. Willard can pick. Pickin in the frame shop with Scott, Willard never did any pickin that called attention to itself. He knew how to go off picking lead, the string work, and sounded very good, but kept it short. It was not a guitar solo that said Here I Am! It was pickin that made the audience listen with respect.

FARE THEE WELL JIM UPCHURCH

view from the jubilee

A drive to Wilkes to the Fairplanes School for a BROC annual Board of Directors meeting. A big spread of food cafeteria style, country cookin brought by the women. It's like Thanksgiving. Everybody ate more than they intended. Our Alleghany group sat a a table; Ernest Joines, Agnes Joines, Eula Rae Sparks Cook, Linda Joines, Jack Joines, me. We have good conversation together around the table. Agnes is, of course, the life of the table. She's the life of wherever she is. I see a great deal of light in her. Jack is as bad as I am about growing a belly and doing nothing about it. He's just like me about it. I suppose that means not very bright, because he doesn't take any better care of himself than I take of myself. What is it? Resignation? Not being so excited by this world to want to continue in it. Refusal to believe it? No. I think in my case it's resignation. Along that line. We all have a good time when we get together. We talk about our hearts, how they're functioning and malfunctioning.

It's strange entering the age range of the people with varieties of afflictions that go with growing old. Everybody has their own individual afflictions. I have very few, I gratefully and humbly acknowledge. By this time along the way, one knows there is no knowing what the next day may bring, or the next moment. Like today I'm sitting on the bench in front of the Jubilee waiting for Ernest and Agnes when this guy walked by I knew when I had the store. He stopped and told me Jim Upchurch had died earlier today. Then he wanted to figure out why--he didn't take good care of himself. So what, I thought, dead is dead. It doesn't matter if he could have held it off by one method or another a year or 2 or 3, or how he got there. He's there. He thought Upchurch had problems, but I didn't. He was the one with problems, somebody who projects himself onto everybody. Upchurch was eccentric and had odd habits like filling up his car with newspapers and magazines to the roof, every space inside except for driver's seat. He filled the trunk such that the car began to drag ground in the back. So he parked it and bought a van. He was at the library every day downloading 40s big band music, 50s tv shows, endlessly downloading and researching websites about little known historical events on the coast of NC way back there in the beginning. He could talk about nearly any subject intelligently and with real knowledge, often first hand experience.

I have always enjoyed Jim Upchurch, enjoyed talking with him whenever I see him. I see him in a way something of a St Francis in that a grown mountain lion took up at his house in the Jefferson Natl Forest in Grayson County one winter when ice was a couple inches thick on the ground for several weeks. Jim gave it a bowl of warm chocolate milk. The lion came back for more. Gradually, it took up at his house and became his friend. Jim reacted vehemently to calling the cat a pet. It was not a pet. He wouldn't think of touching the cat's back, a signal of dominance. The cat would kill him for the suggestion that he was challenging dominance. He was not. Jim has worked with rattlesnakes and poisonous snakes about all his life. He can walk up to a rattlesnake and pick it up. He worked in the Baltimore zoo among the poisonous and threatening big snakes. They were fun for him. He understands their behavior, their thinking, and works in accordance with their natures. I'm not yet used to speaking of him in past tense. I don't even know that he's dead. But this guy that told me hangs out at the library every day too, and he knew Upchurch. Jim will be missed by the library staff. He was in there every day, just about, but was never a bother. In fact, he could help them out with computer knowledge from time to time. He often taught people who came into the library to use a computer how to work one when they were new at it. I would not say he was an idiot savant, because he was no idiot. But he had such a sponge of a mind and fast as lightning, he was nerdy. He'd have been the school nerd, the guy with a slide rule hanging from his belt in high school.

He had a brilliant mind and he was not impractical with it. He was very sensible and sensitive to others. He lived in his own world and that was how he liked it. You can be sure, having a mountain lion on your porch kinda keeps visitors away. He said the cat, Kitty, would meet him at the car when he came home and would zig zag in front of him the way cats do, the way Caterpillar walks in front of me. Crossways this way, crossways that way, back and forth. He stopped at Subway in Independence on the way home to buy 3 chocolate chip cookies for Kitty. Jim would sit on the edge of the porch and the cat walked up behind and put its chin on Jim's right shoulder. Jim would hold up the cookie and the cat would take it. He said he took a bite once and the cat growled, next to his ear. He never did that again.

He said one time he was in the house at the computer when Kitty opened the screen door and walked into the house. Jim thought this was it. The cat came to eat him. Kitty walked all around the room, looking at everything, getting a sense of the space and went back out the door. The only time the cat did that. Kitty would roll onto his back and ask Jim to scratch his chest. The cat would drag a deer he'd caught to the house and Jim would cut it open with a knife and take out the liver, put it in a bowl for him. He cut the deer for the cat, because deer hair is hollow like bamboo and splinters on the cat's tongue. It hurts. Jim saves the cat having to hurt its tongue. A friendly gesture, like offering the liver in a bowl. The only thing odd to me about Jim was that he was a unique individual in the old way of being individual. He wasn't socialized well in school because he was the nerd and had bad teeth, so he was shut out of the conformity game, allowing him to develop individually on his own. He became inward and found the life of his mind much more interesting than social games.

When I met Jim I thought I knew cat behavior pretty well, but when he started telling me about cat nature, big cat nature, which was similar to small cat nature, I found I didn't know anything about cats. This man knew cats. He took several pictures of Kitty over the years. His computer probably has thousands in it. Last time I talked with him, he said Kitty was getting old and he was wondering how much longer he would live. Now Jim went first. My thought when I heard of him dying was, what will the cat do? At the end of Cocteau's film Beauty & The Beast, the Beast says to Beauty, "I am a beast. The only way a beast can show his love is to die of grief." Those are not the exact words, but it catches the meaning. Jim would know exactly what Kitty would do upon Jim's permanent absence. My guess is that Kitty would go to a place he knows, a private place to lie down and die. Jim and the cat have had a close connection for something like 15 years.

I'm of the belief that when a dog or cat comes to me, it's meant to be. A mountain lion went to Jim Upchurch and became his friend for a lot of years. I can't find that it can be said something was wrong with Jim and it carry any meaning. Somebody a mountain lion takes up with and develops a cross-species friendship with on its own, for 15 years, in my way of seeing that man has it together. He was that man Jesus found so rare, a man without guile. In my way of putting it, a true human being. He's evidence to me that if we humans could get over the compulsion to kill everything that's living, we can indeed live in peace with all the critters that haul ass the first moment they catch a glimpse, sound or smell of a human. Jim was a true man of peace, who lived his peace. He wasn't one to tell others to live in peace. He just did it himself. In peace was how he lived his life, every day. Peace is the nature of his soul. Another friend to live in my memory.