OUTTA TOUCH

george segal, parking garage, 1968

On the news at this moment the newscaster is talking about a "heat wave" that's a problem somewhere. I've wondered where the notion came from among people I've seen over the last few days that it's so unbearably hot. To my memory, this is the mildest summer we've had in 25 years at least. My first summers here, 35 years ago, the thermometer touched 90 maybe one day in the summer. About 10 years later it began creeping upward until the hottest day of the year touched 100 several years ago and has done it consistently every year since, except this year. This summer it touched 90 one time. I happened to mention while talking in Selma's that it was a mild summer. Did that ever get a broadside of protest. I was thinking we live in the same place, their temperature has been the same as mine. Now I get it. The news is talking about a heat wave someplace like Texas and people dying. So the people around me in the mildest summer at least of their experiences here are believing it's hotter than it really is because the tv says so. Yesterday, in response to somebody griping about the heat--I'm thinking 80 is not hot--I said, "It's summer," and got called for being a smart-mouth. Again, I remind myself of the power of television.



It made me reflect on the immensity of what I'm not aware of by avoiding television. I don't know the names of any sports stars except, of course, Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods. Don't know of anybody in pop music now except Lady Gaga, and that because she's such a bizarre presence. And enchanting to me like Nina Hagen and Patti Smith were in their time. When I sit in front of a television it's to watch, most often, a foreign film of my choice, and most often made over the last 60 years. I don't keep up with anything new anymore. It has been so long since I've kept up with the new that I'm not even aware of who is a hot dog in the New York art world. When I hear mixes made by young friends on a cd, I hear every variety of rock and roll from rockabilly to Paul Anka to hard-core, even 40s crooning. What's new under the sun? The present moment in rock being a kind of anything-goes market tells me something new is  brewing, a new sound. I've an idea fusion from all over the world is coming into pop music here. New rhythms, new ways of seeing and hearing, putting parts together in new ways.



In the span of time between the dying out of the first surge of rock and roll in America and the "British Invasion," Spencer Davis Group, Dave Clark Five, Rolling Stones, we had a lull in pop music when all kinds of tv pop was played on the radio and the "folk movement," Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, were the beginnings of "underground," in that you had to buy them to hear them. The Brits were livening up the radio again, then Bob Dylan plugged in and created what has been called rock ever since. From then to now, Bob Dylan has been the most amazing human phenomenon of my lifetime, up there with the guy that walked the wire between the World Trade Center towers, Philippe Petite. Bob Dylan is and has been for a long time the Mozart and Shakespeare of songwriting. He has put Cole Porter and Richard Rogers, every songwriter that went before, in the shade. It can be said somebody wrote a great song and somebody else wrote a great song. Then there is Bob Dylan, who has written volumes of great songs, and performed most of them in arrangements that define the songs. He played a harmonica in so distinctively his own sound that no one else can use that sound without sounding like Dylan. To my ear, and to my ear alone, as far as I know, his last 4 albums are his finest to date. Like English playwright Harold Pinter, he waxed better and better in a steady progress. Like a runner from Kenya, the leader of the pack, the one out in front that nobody can catch up with.



I recall the time an aunt who lived in North Palm Beach jumped in my face over the phone because I hadn't heard that Conway Twitty died that day. I've always preferred the Clash to Conway Twitty, the Clash and just about any other band. He never tripped my trigger. He might have if I'd ever paid attention to him, but there are hundreds of bands and singers I'd listen to before Twitty, multiple hundreds. Big deal. According to her, I needed to get out of these mountains and get in the "real" (lol) world where I'll know what's going on. Conway Twitty dying is something going on? Might have been for him, but it was nothing for me. She asked me, confrontationally, if I liked him. I said I don't necessarily like him, but I appreciate him as a musician. Then I was lectured to that I can't appreciate something I don't like. Maybe she can't, but I can. It was more than she could bear that I wasn't upset over Conway Twitty dying. She was getting me upset, but he didn't bother me at all. It was one of those times I wanted to go outside and scream into the center of the bowl of sky overhead, So Fucking What!  Michael Jackson doesn't trip my trigger, either. So what? All it means is I'm not 12.



I couldn't figure out how living on a cul-de-sac in a Florida suburb watching television and listening to country music radio was an example of "in touch" with anything. I'd rather be "in touch" with the people around me, the people I live among, my friends, than anything in the pop world. I see and hear plenty of it, but mostly with indifference. It's rare that I hear a pop song and want to know who did it. When I hear an old-time fiddle tune, or a banjo tune, or a Carter Family song, that's when my ears dance. Right now I have a Friday night source for some of the finest musicians in SW Virginia and NW NC, who blow my mind with their music every Friday night. Live. Small audience of people who know each other. I'd so much rather be "in touch" with the music of Scott Freeman and Willard Gayheart than anything on the radio like Kieth Urban or the Dixie Chicks. I'd rather put on a cd than listen to just about anything on the radio. No XM or any of that radio in the house requiring $20 or so a month. By this time in my life I have cds of all the music I like to listen to, from dance music in Kinshasa to Chicago blues, Taj Mahal, Tibetan nuns, Santana, mountain banjo, and the list goes on so long I can't even start a list. Conway Twitty's name failed to make the list.



Finished a painting today by signing it. I've fussed and fussed with it until I sit and look at it for hours and see nothing else to do. It's complete conceptually and complete visually. It has something of a visual dance. It's night and I can't get a picture without glare. Will get a photograph tomorrow. In original conception, it was a head, a hairless, eyebrowless man's round head. Eyes closed. Initial title was The Old Abbot. The head is the upper half. It is done lightly, almost ghostlike, more like a hologram, though with opaque paint instead of transparent light. Bottom half is a hand print, first time white, then light purple on that and a very pale yellow on top. The same colors used to paint the head. The hand pushes forward boldly while the head fades back a little ways, perhaps an arm's length. A word in stencil spelled vertically to the left of the head, OTHER. Between the head and the hand is the horizontally stenciled word, AND. Then rising from the space between thumb and forefinger the diagonal word, SELF. I'll let you have it from there to make of it what you will. I don't know that my way of seeing it is the only way, so I'd rather let you, like one seeing it on a wall, apply your own meaning. I don't want to limit it to only one meaning. It's not a riddle. It's a visual entertainment only. Any thoughts it might inspire are your own. No test will be given.



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GOD AND DOG

sun in the pines

It's Sunday afternoon, perfect weather, sun out, mild breeze, just enough to ring the wind chimes lightly, several doves at the bird feeder. I like having doves around. I love their voices, who-o-o. I like watching them take off straight up like helicopters, whistling the chirp they make rising from the ground. When I was baptized here in Brush Creek, Glade Valley, in a little baptizin' hole by the side of the road in the meadow with cows around, I think it was 1978, one of the women in the church said she saw three doves fly over, which everybody took for a sign the spirit was there. For me, it just meant three doves flew over. though it did have an interesting ring of mysticism in it. I didn't know, still don't know. Hooray if it was the presence of the Holy Spirit, whatever that is. All I can figure where Holy Spirit is concerned is it might be the aspect of God that communicates with us in signs and intuitions. Please spare me the argument about brain chemistry.



Since one day last week when I wrote comparing getting God's attention to a dog's attention, it has stayed in my mind, because it resonated in a way I'd never seen before, like an insight into God's nature I'd not seen until the moment those sentences were written. I go into a friend's house with a dog. First time, the dog sniffs me, looks at me, appeals to me with eyes to acknowledge presence of consciousness. If I ignore the dog like it's not even there, not seeing the dog, the dog will go lie down on it's place and pay me no more mind. If I walk in the house, see the dog, make eye-contact, speak to the dog by name, touch and pet it, I have a friend I didn't even know a minute before. The dog will watch every move I make waiting for an opening to have some attention from new friend. It rang and rang in my head and continues to ring like windchimes as I see in God's nature something I'd never noticed before.

When somebody doesn't believe the spirit is present, the spirit doesn't care. So I had to believe first, to get God's attention. When I was as confirmed in my atheist phase along the way, totally convinced, as I ever was, some discourses of Meher Baba fell into my hands. Two days of reading randomly in his discourses and I became convinced that God indeed is. Once that was known, or maybe it is more accurate to say believed, I could not live as before, when I didn't see it. Meher Baba recommended that I practice, really practice, the religion of my culture. Baptist? Baptist. That was a Tall order, since I'd spent my time post emancipation rejecting everything Baptist. All of a sudden a consciousness that knew me better than I knew myself was with me wherever I was, guided me to the mountains in the course of a year. All I knew of the mountains were Walker Evans photographs and Doris Ullman photographs of Appalachian poverty. That's all I thought there was in the mountains, poverty and illiteracy. I was going to my little cabin home in the wilderness of toothless illiteracy, Wrong Turn North Carolina. Leaving "the world," I was given a dog for a companion and teacher.



What a joke it was to find the world was here too. Of course it was. What kind of thinking led me to think it might not be? Not thinking. This is where I learned "the world" is the human mental construct we collectively agree upon, calling it reality. There came a time that when something happened seemingly from outside that reality, and someone said, "That was weird," I'd think without saying, Not necessarily. I wouldn't say anything, because if queried, I couldn't give an answer, certainly not an objective answer to pass a test by. I feel like now I live in a zone between the reality of this world, the mind, and the reality of the spirit as revealed in the Tao te ching. The way of the spirit and the way of the world in the same sentence make a paradox. Two lines from verse 71: Not-knowing is true knowledge. / Presuming to know is a disease. To the mind that adheres to the commonly agreed upon mental construct reality, it's nonsense. Seen by the flow of the non-aggressive spirit, it doesn't even need thinking about. It's clear as the moon on a still pond.



An email this morning from my friend Sarah who grew up in Myrtle Beach saying she'll be playing fiddle for a square dance with a youth group at Meher Baba's center between Myrtle Beach and North Myrtle Beach on 500 acres of virgin forest and beach with cabins and communal kitchens. That's where he knocked my socks off and set me to going barefoot. Her email brought back those 2 days and nights of mind racing as fast as it's ever gone, receiving new understandings, one after the other almost unto Tilt. I suppose that someone who calls himself a scientist would say I did, indeed, go tilt. Maybe I did. Hooray if I did. As a result, I don't believe that objective is possible. I take science for a good thing, like I take auto mechanics for a good thing. In the world of the agreed upon mental construct, science is a God-send. Maybe someday as a result of advanced science the people of "the world" will lay off hating and killing each other. God hasn't been able to convince us there is a better way to live in the world over 5,000 years of avatars and scriptures. Maybe science can help.



Found a good quotation from Konrad Lorenz, the Austrian ethologist, I believe I  found the missing link between animal and civilized man. It is us.

Bingo.

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WANNA VS OUGHTA

cosmic moment

Wet rainy day, 60 degrees, makes me want to sleep all day. Took a good nap awhile ago. Caterpillar napping all day. Fiddler's convention coming up tonight. I feel drawn to it by oughta and should, and not at all by wanna. I don't feel any wanna. When I get right down with myself about why, it comes back that I just don't care. I have never liked competitions from childhood on to now. I don't like participating in competitions whether I win or lose. A win I take for nothing and a loss I take for nothing. Judging at a fiddler's convention, like judging any art form, painting, photography, poetry, quilt making, what have you, is totally subjective with some basic objective principles some judges adhere to and some do not. I don't question their decisions, because I don't have the ear or the experience for it. It would be foolish to let me be a judge. Usually it's musicians who are the judges. I've never found argument with fiddler's convention judging because it's a mystery how they can distinguish between the top 10 enough to scale them 1 thru 10. I've got to where I consider a top 10 placement the same as #1.



It's enjoyable to hear the music. There's no two ways about that. A band comes onstage, plays two tunes as wound up and tight as they can get, then it's over and they leave the stage. The next band comes up when everybody gets rounded up and does the same thing. It feels unnatural to me. It doesn't feel invalid by any means, just unnatural. I'd prefer to hear the bands at someplace like the Jubilee in Sparta, or the Floyd Country Store, Applewood in Cana, Rex Theater in Galax, The Front Porch Gallery in Woodlawn, where the bands play for the people that love their music. And I like hearing them at home on cd about the best. When I get right down to the core of it, it's that I don't like to get out in a crowd of people. That's something else I've had from childhood. Maybe I got it from daddy who hated standing in line so much (WW2 Marine) we'd go to movies in the middle and sit through the cartoons and previews and the blank space between movies, then watch the first half and leave. It taught me to go by clues in the second half of a movie to figure out the first half. I have never done it since I've had a choice, but still think it an interesting way to see a movie.



I prefer my visits with other people in small numbers, less than a handful numbers. I tend to want to talk WITH whoever it is I'm talking with, not be practicing the art of running my mouth as fast as breathlessly possible to say nothing in the largest number of words. When I'm at a fiddler's convention I feel like I'm doing what is expected of me and wish I had stayed home because of it. Like when I stopped smoking for ten years, then started smoking again because I didn't like being identified a non-smoker. I don't like the smug manner of non-smokers that look down on smokers. Makes me want to smoke-smoke-smoke that cigarette. That's about as far as my inner rebel goes. Don't count on me to carry a gun for some dumb-ass rebel leader who is all about ego. No chance of getting caught in an FBI sting operation because money has no value for me. They'll never be able to set me up to receive a suitcase full of hundred dollar bills in a motel room on camera. Not a playa. That's all in the money game I don't play. Just watch it in movies.



A large part of what I like about this curmudgeon phase I'm enjoying so much is that I'm only doing things I like doing and only seeing people I like seeing. I'm truly grateful for the inner calm of this time when I give myself permission to go where I want to go because I want to for my own aesthetic interest, not what's expected of me because I used to have a radio show of mountain music. I have to confess, too, that a lot of the oughta, should, needta is self-generated. When I stop paying attention to it, I do what I really want to do and have a good time all the time. I'd rather go to Selma's for coffee and a visit with whoever I run into there. That just about says it, doesn't it. I don't wanna go.



Just now went to the kitchen, got a beer and said out loud, "I'm not going." Good. That's settled. I've heard two weather forecasts, one 20%, the other 80%. I guess I have to admit to myself I miss nearly all the fiddler's conventions because I don't enjoy them. I love the music, but it doesn't turn me on hearing the musicians so tight with a chance to only play two songs. Not enough time to warm up and get in the music groove and let it flow. No time at all for that. Of course, I understand studio recordings are made that way too. The real deal is that I don't like going out with hundreds or thousands of people around. It's why I prefer the small town to the city, Sparta traffic to Charlotte traffic. I always went to small schools. Could not go to a mega university. They wouldn't accept me anyway.


It disturbs my mind somewhat to see how much in the past I adhered to oughta, gotta, should, needta. That, I think I got from mother, school, church, television, and everybody in my life. Paying attention to it came from school where I'm told all the time it's this way and not that way, true or false, multiple choice, this not that, time-saving tests to grade since our educational system is more about form than function. It should be this way, not that way. This way over here is correct, that way over there is not. I felt in my experience like k-6 was real schooling, and 7-12 factory schooling. My college I felt was real schooling, again, to a degree. Going from 6th grade to 7th grade was a serious shock. I wasn't ready for factory life, had no idea that's what it would be. Largely, I find myself bewildered like everyone around me by the continuing changes in civilization, in belief systems, in approval, until I want to stay in peace at home where I seldom play music any more because I like the quiet so much. I don't think I'm like a snail pulling into its shell, which I'm ok with, but more like a homing pigeon that found its way home.

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SCOTT FREEMAN AND WILLARD GAYHEART AT THE FRONT PORCH

 scott freeman and willard gayheart

 scott freeman and willard gayheart



willard gayheart

scott freeman

Before the show tonight, Scott asked why I didn't go to the fiddler's convention in Sparta. There is only one answer, plain and simple. "I'd rather listen to you and Willard." There is no other answer. Fiddler's conventions have a lot of good music, but I often wish I'd brought a book for the spaces between and the music that aint fer shit. I'm not one to walk around and see people I know and stroll around in the camping area to hear the music there. I'd rather sit in my seat and enjoy the show. More than likely it's something I carry from childhood. Going to movies as a kid, other kids were walking and running up and down the aisles throughout the movie. It seemed like the thing to do. If I'd ask daddy if I could go get some candy or go pee I'd get talked to about no running up and down the aisles--stay in your seat. Staying in my seat at movies and concerts became the way I do at movies and shows. I have gone against that teaching a time or two to see what it is about it that other people like so much. I've never found anything about it worth getting up from my seat.

I've never been a chit-chatter. Talking for the sake of making noise never caught on with me. I can't say why, because I don't know why. Perhaps it had something to do with being told when I wanted to say something at the dinner table, "Nobody wants to hear you." That was that. I grew up believing nobody wanted to hear anything I had to say. Nobody at home did. It made me a talker among friends at school and other places. I talked a streak. Then that talking streak ended, perhaps because I became self-aware along the way. Also, I talk so slow I tend to get interrupted every sentence I speak, so in certain company where conversation amounts to interrupting anecdotes with anecdotes, I stop talking. I've never liked interruption as a form of conversation. At this time in my life, my curmudgeon phase, I don't put up with interruption. Once interrupted, I'm done. If it's from lively conversation and out of control, that's ok. When I'm talking with someone and somebody walks in interrupting and taking over, I do not tolerate it. I turn and walk away. Interruption is the American form of conversation in all classes. It's how we talk with short attention spans. It's so pervasive in America it's patriotic.

Anyway, I'm a stay in my seat kinda guy. I don't think that's so unusual. About 98% of every audience I've been in stays in their seats throughout like it's no big deal. After my harangue about walking about during a concert, I spent tonight's show mostly on my feet with video camera making video of every song but a few I used for still photographs. It was a good show. Scott and Willard make a great duo. Willard talks about Scott being a special breed of musician, one who plays in the realm of excellence like he's in a league above Willard. But Willard is too. The people Willard looks to as the best musicians around all love to make music with Willard because he's so good. The fact of the matter is that I regard them equals, as I'm sure Scot does too. Equal or not, they make music together as good as music gets made. I wasn't deciding by what I'm supposed to do, should do or am expected to do. I did question which to go to, called Willard to find out who'd be playing there, thinking if it were some band or individual whose music doesn't trip my trigger, of very few possibilities, I'd go to the convention. When he said it was Scott and him, there was no decision to make.

The music tonight gave the audience good feeling throughout the show. On the last tune, Scott playing Angelina Baker on fiddle, the audience broke into spontaneous applause while he was playing. Lonesome River Band was playing at fiddlers convention at 7 and 9. I did not regret missing them for Scott and Willard. In this time in my life I follow my own taste and interests. I've been instructed along the way by oughta, should, needta, better, gotta, s'posed to. None of them worked out. Usually whenever I followed somebody's instruction figuring they knew better than I did what would suit me, it's been a mistake. I broke free from that and now it really pisses people off when I say, "I don't do should," or "I don't do s'posed to." It pisses them off seriously, so much they puff up and leave, which suits the hell outta me. Perhaps I say it with a finality in tone of voice. I don't care how I say it. I'm so damn tired of being told what I should do by people who don't even know me that it doesn't make a bit of difference anymore how they take it. Do it yourself, I want to say, if it's so damn necessary.

I'll have the videos up on YouTube by end of weekend. There are aplenty now on YouTube of Scott and Willard. Put their names in the search box and you'll get a bundle of songs by them. I tend to put up them doing the same song 2 or 3 times, because each rendering is uniquely itself and different from the others. Like there is one of Willard singing Yellow Rose of Texas standing up with the band Skeeter & the Skidmarks, layin it to it. He sings it another way altogether sitting down with guitar singing it folk style. Very different renderings and both excellent. One Scott sang tonight he's done quite a lot, She's My Curly Headed Baby, he did Western Swing style with Willard keeping a good swing going with his rhythm guitar and Scott working the mandolin. Tonight's rendition had an energy in it I've not heard him give it before. It really swung. At the end, I spoke out loud, "That was really nice." Couldn't keep it inside. Had to let it out. Really good show tonight. I was where I needed to be, footsteps right down the centerline of my path. 

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