WEARISOME DAY

first sign of approaching autumn

Middle August is the time the first bits of color start popping out. Earlier today I was looking out the window and saw this across the road. The weather is cooling down a little bit. In the 60s at night again. Wont' be long until I'll have to close the windows. The next step will be occasionally having heat, then always having heat until next summer. Winter gets a bit tiresome about February, but when I think of all that winter does for us, I'm happy for it. Malaria first. We don't have malaria because we have winters. The winter keeps fleas, ticks and other pests down. It's malaria I'm most grateful about. Once it takes hold in you it never lets go. The Mongol hordes in the time of Genghis Khan and Kublai Khan liked to stay up north along the route of the silk road, their road for carrying loot back to Mongolia from the region where all the countries end in -stan. They learned when they went south, they came down with diseases, their bows didn't shoot as well and their horses lost their vitality. Somewhere I read long ago conjecture that Job of the Bible lived in what is now called Uzbekistan, Uz then. In the time of the Mongol hordes all the -stans were under Kazakhstan, which was then enormous. The Mongols obliterated their civilization. There was no defense against them.

These are my thoughts with the approach of winter. I'm not so crazy about the cold, but I love not having malaria a concern and a long list of other diseases. We still have plenty of diseases. Global warming will spread malaria northward. That's not today's concern. It's the concern of today's grandchildren. Who cares about them? Not any capitalist American. Not any American Christian, the ones that go about announcing themselves as such wherever they go in the guise of hate, perverting the name. They want to see the whole earth go up in flames, believing they won't be here to be part of it, because Jesus is gonna come get them. Whatever. It's like Jehovah's Witnesses having the rich man's house picked out they want to live in when they're one of the 40 thousand, or whatever the number, left on a destroyed earth. I say let them have all they want. They don't come to my door anymore. I don't think they want to live here. Last time some were here, I said you've come to my house to tell me what you believe; since you're in my house I'll tell you what I believe. They ran for their lives. Never returned. Thank you. Thank you. That was easy.

I dread paying the winter's heating bill. I didn't realize how much I was saving burning wood. It was an enormous amount of saving. It's got so expensive now to live, it can't keep going on this way, though it will. Next will be a city of poverty around our city dumps like Mexico City where a major population of people find everything they use and eat. Thirty more years of Reagan Junta and we'll be well on our way to becoming the next India. Has anyone but me noticed that over the last 30 years the CEOs and other execs, the suits, take all the wealth for themselves and the work force hasn't had a cost of living increase in 30 years while prices have kept on increasing with inflation? Working people get poorer by the year. The ones that get by taking for themselves get richer by the year. I think of the old hymn, Farther Along. Farther along, we'll know all about it; farther along, we'll understand why. It's the way of the world. All I know to do is vote against Republicans. That's why I vote. Like I've said before, I believe in the boycott of one. So I've just pist off 3 groups of people. None of them read me, so they'll never notice until somebody tells them about it, which will be the case in all 3. I wouldn't have said it if I didn't mean it. It's not a mistake.

It's been a peculiar day. I've felt like sleeping all day. So I did. Sleep 2-4 hours, up for awhile, then feel like going back to sleep for a few hours. During one of the awake spells I watched Stephen Seagal's other recent move I'd not yet seen, Driven To Kill. Pure Seagal. The best of Seagal. Not necessarily the best one, but among the best. He didn't want to do it, but he had to. Somebody tried to kill his daughter, almost got the job done, and killed his ex wife. Early in the story bad Russian mob boys set out to get him. When somebody says they're out to get Seagal, he becomes a dead man walking. He will not survive the film. It's a story of Seagal investigating to find out who did it. His character is quite a sleuth. I enjoy Seagal films on a whole new level after finding Zatoichi the blind swordsman in his character. It's too complex to try to explain why I like Seagal's stories so much. I like an action movie from time to time. They have a quick pace. There's the political correctness stance on violence that I don't buy. Anybody can be as PC as they want, just leave me out of it. I had a brief conversation with an eccentric old feller in the post office once about a bumper sticker on his Mercedes that said he is not PC. We had a fun moment laughing at the concept and how pervasive it is for a conformity device. One thing that really helped Obama was political correctness said to vote for him. I found it an interesting phenomenon.

I can say I know why I like Seagal's films but can't explain it. Too many reasons and they all weave in and out of each other. It turns into a jumble when I try to pick it apart, one reason at a time. In a way, they're as much cartoons as Spiderman or Godzilla. I like cartoons. Not exclusively, but I do appreciate cartoons. His character is somewhat 3-dimensional in that he contradicts himself like all the rest of us do. He's a man with a spiritual life that is not stifling; rather it's his guide. He comes from the world of espionage fiction like Tom Clancy with his own twist. It's like a peephole into the doings of the CIA and bigtime mobs. I can see it at a safe distance when it's entertainment.

To see it any closer, I'd have to be there, and I don't want to do that. Tell me a good fictional story of somebody who rights wrongs from a world I know nothing about. Total fantasy. Also, he makes films in different countries. I like to see landscapes and cityscapes in parts of the world I'll never visit. I've always had immense curiosity about other cultures, other parts of the world, other times. It's been with me as long as I remember. Because somebody is not born in my country or not of my race does not invalidate that person before my eyes one little pixel. Seagal feels the same.

Everybody want to be a tough guy.

But nobody want to pay the price.

---Steven Seagal

OLD TIME NEW TIME

air bellows outdoor art museum

The crickets and the tree frogs are singing and chirping. Sometimes I wonder what it sounded like back when this was all farms, the night chorus of these critters, and from up the holler a banjo's notes in the air. A lot of the old houses are gone, nearly all the barns. The people are gone, the clothes they wore are gone, the wagons they rode are gone, the guns remain in vaults and on the walls of gun collectors, and the musical instruments continue. Often they stay in the family. Sometimes they're sold. Or they're in museums. Many of them go on making music, are treasured as great great grandpa's fiddle, either hanging on the wall or in its old case with the handle missing, played only on special occasions. The old culture is so gone now it is functionally over but for the values carried by descendants, the ways of believing, the nature of faith. The music is very much alive. About every county in the mountains has a place for local music and dancing. The music corporations ASCAP and the like would have them all shut down if they had their way unimpeded, which they do to a point. They shut down jams too. They're doing their best to stifle creativity outside their control. It's working.

When I think creativity in America is stifled, all I have to do is go to a karaoke bar and see individual after individual singing their hearts out onstage. These people are good. I went with Jean one night to a place on the highway to Mt Airy called Rock Bottom, a roadside beer place with bands on the weekends. Karaoke night. It was a peaceable place. A friendly place. I saw a guy with a harley tshirt and a bandanna on his head sing like a bird. Women, men, anybody who wanted to. These people, all of them have practiced and awful lot in the shower or wherever they sing. Karaoke uses pop songs of our time for the standards the way jazz in the 50s used Broadway tunes for the standards. Curious, seeing the music I've watched evolve from the start when I was 13 over half a century to the place it's the music of our collective American culture.

In the 50s Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Bo Diddley, Buddy Holly, Bill Haley, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis inspired reaction by the adults. It weakened the kids to Communism. It was Communist propaganda destroying the minds of the kids. Every kind of attempt was made to shut it down. Dick Clark is lauded as the Hot Dog of rock & roll, but he was in the front line of the forces set on destroying rock & roll. He promoted doo-wop black boys and Italian pretty boys, Anita Bryant. Allan Freed was put through all kinds of legal problems promoting the new music. His life was more or less ruined by the reactionary force. Among adults, he was the enemy of the adults from the inside, a virus. All the adults were saying, "It will never last." When my parents said it, all I could think was, I don't care. Among the Andrews Sisters, the Lennon Sisters and the Four Lads, suddenly was Chuck Berry honking Maybellene, "Cadillac rollin down open road, nothin outrunin my V-8 Ford. Cadillac doin about 95, bumper to bumper rollin side to side. Maybellene why caint you be true? Oh Maybellene---why caint you be true? You done started back doin the things you used to do."

Maybellene, Shake Rattle & Roll, Long Tall Sally, Hey Bo Diddley, Heartbreak Hotel, Peggy Sue. All these songs started appearing between the white music that went before. I tended to listen to the black station in KC at the time, because that's where I could hear the black music, like Slim Harpo, Big Mama Thornton, Big Maybelle, Little Walter, Ruth Brown. When the white station was playing Elvis's Hound Dog, the black station played Big Mama Thornton's Hound Dog. She wrote it. Elvis gave her a Cadillac instead of songwriter's royalties. He got off real cheap. I heard people like Ivory Joe Hunter, Bill Doggett, Ray Charles before crossover, Big Joe Turner. It was a rich time in my life for discovering music. Both the black sound and the white sound exploring new sounds with the electric guitar. Duane Eddy, Forty Miles of Bad Road. Electricity was changing music like it changed everything else. Changing it fast.

By 1960, Chuck Berry was in prison, Jerry Lee Lewis disgraced, Elvis in the Army, Little Richard preaching, Buddy Holly dead. Freddie Cannon was about all that was left of rock & roll. It was just about shut down in America when records started coming over from England, Spencer Davis Group, Dave Clark 5, then the Beatles and the Stones and rock & roll was back. There was no stopping it after the British invasion. Bob Dylan went from acoustic to electric, psychedelia spread from San Francisco; Big Brother & Holding Company (Janis Joplin), Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix and beyond. Then Led Zeppelin, heavy metal, then punk and it stayed punk until it became mainstream after a quarter century on college radio stations. The 20th century was a renascence in art and it was a renascence in music, all kinds of music. It was a highly creative time in every field of human interest.

What rock has evolved into now, I have very little idea. What I hear and see is telling me it's a time in pop music like the post-modern period in art where everything that went before is given expression in various blends. Fusion from all over the world and every kind of music. Tells me it's evolving really fast right now. It's universal pop now all around the world, every culture, every place. Even in the remotest places on earth. It has pushed to the background traditional musics all over the world, not just here. The traditional musics change, but they don't die. It's looking like Kilby Spencer and his sister Martha are devoting their lives to keeping the Whitetop music tradition alive and moving into the future. Kilby is a computer technician to make a living and a fiddler to make music. He plays banjo, guitar and bass too. They'll pass the music to the next generation like their mother and dad did. Kilby has been uploading a lot of good old-time videos of whitetop music. You can find his videos at whitetopmusic on YouTube. He's uploaded a lot of really good old-time videos. Even with media advanced as it is now making YouTube possible, old-time lives alongside everything else. It's no longer the only music, but it is a part of the whole, and will always be. Maybe.

NEW STEVEN SEAGAL MOVIE

Saw the new Steven Seagal movie, A Dangerous Man, yesterday, twice. It's a good Seagal movie again. After a couple that were really bad, I was hesitant to pick up the next Seagal dvd that came along. A friend who watches movies about Nazi zombies told me the new one is really good. I didn't know how to take that. Thought it wouldn't hurt to check it out and see. I like a Seagal movie good or bad, unless it's really bad. Kill Switch, 2008, was so bad I could only give it one star at netflix and that for simply existing. It was a cliche of what people who don't like his kind of movies expect. I can't help but think it was a conscious decision made by Seagal possibly in relation to a lawsuit with Las Vegas mafia outfit over breaking a contract. My feeling, and it's only feeling based in little information, is that he was sentenced to complete the contract and did, making them the worst movies he could make. That's entirely conjecture. Something wasn't right. It was made the same year as Pistol Whipped, one of his better ones, and Urban Justice, another of his better ones. There were 2 in between them that have low ratings. I won't see the other one unless I'm in a nursing home paralyzed and it's on the television. The 2nd was called Against The Dark. He's a vampire hunter in it. Ho hum.



Over and over I hear people say and read it somewhere that Steven Seagal can't act. That's a standard belief about him. He's no John Malkovich or Anthony Hopkins; he doesn't emote much, but when he does, he does. He's a smooth dude. His characters have a fairly even temperament, meaning his emotions aren't running the gamut in every scene. In A Dangerous Man, a man has a gun on him in one scene telling Seagal he's a dead man. Seagal's answer was that it's said after we die we're in emptiness. He's been in that emptiness for a very long time. Then he took the guy's hand, turned the gun and the guy shot himself. Whoops. It's a truth, whatever somebody goes after Seagal with, a bat, a sword, a gun, a knife, a corkscrew, Seagal takes it and kills them with it. His character from movie to movie is the same, but with different names. In 2 of them he has the same name, Jonathan Cold. From movie to movie, he never kills anyone who isn't trying to kill him. Everyone is safe except anybody trying to kill him.



Seagal grew up in Japan, his parents living there, where a television serial, a Japanese kind of Lone Ranger, Zatoichi(pron: za-toe-each-ee---accent on each) the blind swordsman, a legend in Japan. I've seen 2 films of Zatoichi, one directed and starred in by Takeshi Kitano that is an extraordinary film all the way around. The other by Shintaro Katsu, who also directed and starred in it , made an equally fine film. Shintaro Katsu played Zatoichi the blind swordsman in the original tv series that went on and on like Cisco Kid, Gene Autry, Roy Rogers. Evidently the tv series was very well made and popular, because netflix has a long list of them. Zatoichi is the kind of man Seagal's character is in his films. Zatoichi means no harm to anyone, helps people who need help, his only possessions his robe and his sword. He has a sense for feeling energies, presences of anyone around him and their intent. In a sword fight, the other guy always loses, and Zatoichi never kills anyone who isn't trying to kill him. Children love him and he loves children. No one can sneak up on him but a child with a clear mind. He saves helpless women and children and old people from danger. He gives what little money he has to people who need some. He's a practicing Buddhist, but doesn't wear it on his sleeve.



It's the one with Shintaro Katsu that Seagal models his character after. Seagal's character is not blind but has the feeling for energies like Zatoichi. He's a mysterious individual like Zatoichi, too. No one can defeat either one of them, no matter how many, no matter how good with a sword, gun or martial arts. Seagal's character described himself to someone in Urban Justice, I'm just a bad man trying to do some good. Zatoichi would say the same thing. I had not suspected Seagal's connection with Zatoichi when I saw the movies. I saw Takeshi Kitano's first and loved it. I didn't make the Seagal connection until the second one, which I saw to see how 2 directors handle the same story. The one by Shintaro Katsu has Seagal all over it. I suspect Seagal's films are so successful because he deals with archetypal stories from our roots.



Two more new Seagal films are The Keeper and one made in Russian, Driven To Kill, both 2009. I'm ready for some more Steven Seagal. Thought I'd run out. 3 new ones I'd not seen. Great. When I first discovered Seagal, I had myself a film festival at home seeing every available movie of his movies. It's a big number. I may watch one of my own tonight.

ART ALIVE

air bellows outdoor art museum



Drove up to the Air Bellows Outdoor Art Museum to see what has been added since my last look at it. Some beautiful additions, like the one above. They're beginning to pile up now, words and letters on top of others until all the messages and names are blended into an abstraction where the words and names become irrelevant, just colors. I'm finding it curious that this particular canvas is characterized more by words and names, lines. It seemed in the past there was quite a bit of image making. It's notable less images this time around. It's primarily words and names, sometimes numbers. Seldom an effort to make an image. This one above seems to me an image made the same as a letter of an alphabet. It seems like a social change. Makes me wonder if texting, computers, other social influences were causing the young to see words in their mind's eye instead of pictures. The nature of how the paint is used to express visually, has changed. Almost no attempt to express visual art, but word art. Kind of like what the art world called "concrete poetry" in the late 60s, early 70s.



I'm happy the place chosen by common agreement among the ones who like to do such things is so close to home. The nearest best place. A lot of kids. When they have a place to express their existence in their natural teenage way--no need to try to fight it; it's the same generation after generation, just different expression. With a place of their choice to have that kind of not-supposed-to fun, it gets focused in one place instead of all over town. In one place, it makes a beautiful space. I doubt if many drive through there without griping about they hadn't oughta, like anyone has control. No one has control. It just is what it is. It is beautiful to my way of seeing, esp the spontaneity of it, the chance juxtaposition of colors, the layers that have a degree of meaning when they're on the surface, but after a year or two, more gets painted over them and they become indecipherable background lines of color. The deeper they go, the further away their meaning fades. It's not quite as active the last 2 years as it was before. But it has its own character. Each one is beautifully itself.



Several years ago I made a contribution in a time when it was really active, the walls covered with colors, bold, bright colors, changing every week. Then I watched it get buried under several more layers of lines and colors until it was out of sight but for occasional bits of color peeping through. Then a new canvas. I think that was the time a neighbor caught a kid in there spraying. He knew the kid. Told the kid's mother. Parkway got involved. His punishment was to paint the walls and ceiling with a roller, paint over all the art. I think it was painted brown. It doesn't matter what the base color. It was getting ready for a new canvas. It doesn't hurt to periodically get wiped out of existence and start a new canvas fresh. Like the Tibetan sand paintings. The making of it is the purpose. When it is over it is brushed away by the Dalai Lama. The painting on the walls is impermanence itself. It's as impermanent as all the text messaging being done in one given hour. I'm seeing the art in the tunnel an art expression of texting, brief messages, short words and names. I can't number the pictures I've taken in there since it started. I think it was some time in the 80s when the first words appeared. It wasn't long before the whole inside was covered.



For a long time they kept the paint off the rocks, then some years ago somebody painted on the rocks at either entrance, then they were covered right away, the signs painted black. Excess. The Parkway cleaned off the rocks, replaced the signs and painted the walls. This round that's on now is what came next. I have a feeling there may not be a lot more on the rocks. But barriers get broken in this kind of art form as any. They get bolder every year in what they picture. It's approaching a place in its evolution of teenage rebellion where they're looking for the line that says no further. Lines drawn for decency were crossed so long ago not much is shocking anymore. It's funny that nothing can stop it from being a visual assault on a value system. Authorities, parents can't stop it. Short of keeping a guard there round the clock, nothing can be done to stop it. Attempts to stop it increase it.


I see it a living canvas. Like the abstract expressionist painter who looks awhile, then puts a splash of color in one place, then another someplace else, covering the canvas in unexpected colors and shapes. Spontaneous, apparently random, group expression one individual at a time blending all the names and desires with the generation of kids in school over the years. It's been at least 25 years of teenagers. I suppose that means the first ones to paint in there are in their 40s now. All the paint is still there, layer upon layer under the paint on the present surface. It's kind of like reincarnation. One grows and grows, then is gone, blotted out to nothingness, then another layer of something that grows with time until it, too, grows old and dies, is covered over as though it had never been. It comes back to life and grows into a work of art that makes me as happy to live where I live as the view either side of the Parkway from the museum grounds, best above on the road level. It's a beautiful panorama both directions. One way Traphill and beyond, the other way Whitehead, Pine Swamp, Gap Civil and beyond. An outdoor art museum with a view. You can't beat that. And we don't have to pay anybody to do it. No admission. There it is, like Natural Bridge in Virginia. Honk as you go through. It's fun. Kids love it. So does the kid within under several layers of experience where the words have no more meaning, and appear between other colors. Lines and colors. This moment had its day.