R-E-S-P-E-C-T

sitting bull

I've been hearing on the Charlotte FM station advertising recently for something of a workshop on Respect. The talk that goes with it tells that respect is something gone away from society and we need it back. My thought first time I heard it: Hmm, somebody noticed. I have to agree, in the urban world respect is absent and not missed as if it never had been, though in certain circles rappin gangstas kill each other for "disrespect." The workshop situation is for the white middle class, NPR listeners. In the white working class you still find respect. I'm wondering how much the falling away of respect in middle class mind has to do with the fast fade of old institutions in our time where respect was important. As they go away, respect goes with them, evidently. I'm wondering about the absence of community in the suburban middle class, what a sense of community has has to do with respect. I can say that in my own community in the NC mountains, Whitehead immediately and the whole county generally, a great deal of respect is going around. In what is left of mountain culture, an individual is respected for humility, for honesty, for helping others, and of course, for money. Anybody with money is respected everywhere in America, the world. That's part of the appeal for accumulating money, especially in a world where there's little to no respect for anything else.

People know each other in a rural community. A lot of people complain about the gossip and go to cities to get away from gossip, but they find it there too. I've come to see gossip as a kind of glue that keeps a community aware of the different individuals in the community like they're movie stars. In my first years in the mountains listening to Tom Pruitt tell about his life and people he'd known along the way, I noticed he spoke of the people of his community with the same tone of importance that city people talk about tv and movie stars. He spoke of the people in his world the same as people spoke of celebrities where I came from. I saw the people of his telling in my mind a little bit bigger than life. When I met different ones I'd heard him talk about, his brother Millard, for one, I was struck every time by seeing this is just another person, not a celebrity. They kind of shrank in my mind at first, seeing they were not celebrities. That caused me to adjust my own thinking. I came to see, knowing other mountain people of Tom's generation that this is how people talked about each other before radio, movies and tv started bringing celebrities into our lives. Now, we talk about celebrities with respect, and each other with watered down derision for not being celebrities.

I realized that the tone of voice Tom was using when he told about different people of the community was respect. It took me awhile to get there, because it took me awhile to catch on to respect as not only something valid, but important. When we look up to celebrities, we look at all the people around us, and ourselves, as they call us in the News, the ordinary people. Celebs are special and we're ordinary. My parachute landed me in a world where they hadn't caught on yet that celebrities were important and we were ordinary. I was seeing that the people all around me saw each other and themsleves the same kind of important accorded to celebrtities. A few months ago there was a buzz around that Robert Downey Jr had been to a certain country store in the county. Very big deal! It was like somebody came in from Celebrity Planet and wowed the people of Ordinary Planet. I confess, I was was impressed one of my favorite American actors had been in the county. Several people I know wished they could have met him. All I could think was, what would I say? You're really cool, meaning I'm really not.

It's like passing up a chance to meet Ralph Stanley. The people around him say, "He's just a man," which I already know. He's a country boy from the same generation of several people I've known here. His county, Dickenson in SW Virginia, is much like my county, Alleghany in NC, though he's in coal country and I'm not. That is definitely a difference. I've seen him up close a few times at concerts, like when he was at the table autographing for fans. He was the same size and weight, talked like and even walked the same as Tom's brother Millard, the Regular Baptist preacher who had a voice for singing as hauntingly beautful as Ralph Stanley's. I know he's just a man, and I could speak with him on that level. However, at the same time that he's just a man, he's also Ralph Stanley. I'm in awe of Ralph Stanley and believe my respect for the celebrity would obscure the man himself. I still have the sense that celebrities are beyond the ordinary. I hear an interview with artist Robert Motherwell and listen to every word like it's from Truth itself. I hear a local artist I know talking and it's the same as any other "ordinary" person talking. If I knew Motherwell, I would have been hearing just a man instead of the celebrity great artist.

Respect is one of my great learnings from living in mountain culture. There was a time when I believed the white middle class people moving from the suburbs to the exurbs might take an interest in the fact that a really interesting culture is all around them. I would tell new people I'd meet that you can get along very well with any individual of these mountains by treating them with basic human respect. I didn't realize then that respect outside these mountains was waning down to nothing in the middle class. They didn't care. I was flapping my jaws, barking to hear my head roar. Too many times I got a look like, What? I quit making any attempts to make one small step toward easing off the conscious and unconscious disrespect for the mountain people by the intruders. It's an assets point of view, not a cultural point of view. Mountain people have less assets than the people moving in. According to the law of the money and status ladder, you look up, never down. Respect is not a consideration for somebody living in a trailer and working in a factory. How do you respect somebody wearing work boots? How do you respect somebody in a tshirt that says Guns N Roses? Mammon is not a benevolent god, but a god devoid of compassion, love and understanding. I'll go with the god of love and be so poor I have to look up to everybody.

By the latter years of my life I've found my "place" in the world several years ago and I'm happy with it. I'm recalling my friend Jr Maxwell the time I asked him who he looked up to along the way in his life. He said, "I look up to everybody." I felt like I knew what he meant at the time he said it, though after knowing him as years went by, I saw he was not making up something that sounds good for public persona, which I already knew. That kind of thinking was not in him. He did, indeed, look up to everybody. He regarded everyone, low or high, with respectful attention. When you talked to Jr, he heard you. Everyone he knew, he knew for who the individual was, not the what. He respected the man who made big money and bought the biggest house on the highest hill the same as he respected the man working for him at the sawmill who threw all his money away drinking on the weekends. Jr might have thought it heedlessly self-defeating behavior, but he was a man just the same. Jr regarded people he did not trust the same as people he trusted. He recognized you have to watch out for one and you don't have to watch the other. Both are valid human beings deserving at least basic respect for their humanity. Of all my learnings from mountain people I've known, the one characteristic that every one of them embodies is respect. I'm coming to believe respect holds community together, too. I see where there is no community, respect is just a word on a spelling test.


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HENRY GELDZAHLER AND POP ART

roy lichtenstein

Today's video was a fairly collage-like documentary of art and artists in NY. 1950-1970. I liked about the film that it caught the spirit of the time and place, post-WW2 New York, the abstract expressionist period, emphasis in the film on the flow into Pop then minimalism unto conceptualism, the last years of the Modern period that began with Impressionism. The film looked at the art of this period through the point of view of Henry Geldzahler, a museum curator who involved himself in the art of the time visiting new artists, getting to know them, finding out what they were doing, discovering a new spirit among younger artists in the time Abstract Expressionism was finally being recognized as valid art, then the oncoming of Pop that Geldzahler recognized as the next new thing. I remember his name from the art press of the time, books on Pop I read to find out about the new are that had the abstract expressionist painters calling it propaganda and anything else they could think of. Abstraction was soft-edged and Pop was hard-edged, a major difference in the time, a difference the abstractionists pointed to as invalid in painting.

Pop was possibly the first art period of the Modern era that caught the public eye. There were long lines of people waiting to get into a show of the new Pop artists. I went to New York in the time and saw a huge show of Pop with hundreds of people milling about, talking about particular sculptures and paintings with an excited awe. I felt it too. It was fun. It was nutty. It was off the wall. A show of Abstract Expressionists was serious. It was an intellectual art form. It embraced existentialism. It was pure art, expression as it happened. Pop popped the bubble of intellectual art that you had to read Nietzsche to really get it, Unamuno too. The spirit of pop broke the line between high art and low art. Pop made high art by incorporating low art, like rock n roll in the way it incorporates other musics. Anything that gets close to it, rock incorporates. Pop was open to finding art everywhere you look, like the grocery store, the beach, the sidewalk, store fronts, graffiti, beer cans. Geldzahler created exhibitions, bought for museums, connected artists with collectors and created his own collection.

Henry Geldzahler's name was as well known in that time as one of the artists. He was most widely known as somebody who appreciated Andy Warhol's work when few got it. Geldzahler created the Modern collection in the Metropolitan. The day I went to the Met, I was awed by what I saw when I stepped into the space.

I have to stop. The blogger site has an interface that seldom works. Tonight it is not working AGAIN.

THE VIEW FROM THE MOUNTAIN

              barnett newman

It's October 31. At 9:30pm I mark 36 years in the mountains. Driving up the Parkway from highway 21 into fog thicker and thicker until about the last five or six miles were in dense fog we call "peasoup." It required hanging head out the side window watching the double yellow line beside the front tire. Ahead was a white wall I drove through. Headlights made it even more opaque, opaque by light. I drove up the mountain watching the lines beside the tire, the only spot where I could see the road. The light reflecting from the fog lit the spot beside the wheel, and behind the wheel it was blackness of night. Up the winding mountain highway I traveled at about 5mph. Passing the overlooks and places where roads came into the Parkway was frightening; the double yellow line stopped for a space of 20 to 30 feet. I had no guarantee I'd connect with the yellow lines at the other end of that space. I might drive into the rock wall, or in my mind that had no understanding of driving in the mountains I might drive off the side of the mountain down a cliff and explode at the bottom like in movies. About the time uncertainty crept into my mind whether the double yellow lines would appear again, it wasn't long before I found them.

Of an English major mind, I drove through the fog dwelling on the symbolism of passing through a stretch of dense mountain peasoup to my new life, shrouded in the unknown, focused on the immediate present, tire beside the double lines. It seemed appropriate that my new life in the unknown would begin with a cloud to drive through, a tunnel from my life past to my life future. I didn't look at it as a good sign or a bad sign, rather a flow through what was literally a tunnel of light, ascending the mountain, Air Bellows Mountain, elevation 3,700ft. Even after the Parkway, driving down Air Bellows Gap Road, unpaved, I watched the ditch beside the tire on the left side. The right side of the road went almost straight down and did not have a rock wall like on the Parkway. I saw in my mind the truck rolling down the side of the mountain, bouncing from tree to tree like a pinball: tilt. Didn't want to do that, so I kept the left front tire at the edge of the gravel where I could more or less see the edge of the road. Turned down the paved driveway to the house, maybe a tenth of a mile. By the time I parked the pickup, I felt like I'd crossed a three hundred mile bridge from one continent to another.

Driving out of Charleston on I-26 I watched the city I loved in the rearview mirror become rooftops, then a few church steeples, then nothing but sky above the rising wall of highway that washed over the city like a rogue tsunami. The first half of the drive up the interstate, a review of where I was coming from floated in my mind. I looked at the urban life I was driving away from, all my associations in the city, my friends I'll stay in touch with the rest of my life, my friends I won't stay in touch with, cocktail parties, the college, and my reasons for wanting, even needing to go somewhere else. It wasn't that I rejected the city or the city rejected me, but that I wanted to work outdoors with a labor job for a period of at least five years in a rural way of living, looking for a chance at solitude, though not in the absolute form. My inner compass had made a 180 degree turn a year before, when I found to my skeptical satisfaction that God indeed Is. Just getting it changes everything. Once I see it, I cannot go on like I did before I saw it, in every way. It is a change at the core. It changes attitude toward life. I needed a place to go to, to process the transition from who I am, living with ego for my guide, to who I am, guided by the Master, the one who knows the Way.

Thirty-six years ago, I had no idea of the world my parachute landed me in. It seemed at the time like it had the potential to be a major error. There were plenty of times in the first couple years I seriously questioned if I'd done something really stupid this time, even more stupid than the big one before, or  the series of stupid ones around it, leading me to the understanding that I don't know how to make a good decision for myself. Let go and let God. That one works pretty good. Since I have problems with making intelligent decisions for myself, allowing God's guiding light to help really does make a difference. What I thought I came to the mountains for I imagined would take about five years. It ended up taking twenty. That was to get myself to a fairly balanced outlook, at least more balanced than before, which was out of balance. Internal changes take longer than I'd like to imagine. Like social changes, they take awhile.

Thirty-six years into the unknown, the decision to move to the mountains was one of the better decisions of my life. I can see it in retrospect as the natural next thing. It's been a very interesting trip though I've stayed in one spot the whole time. I love about it the people I have known and the inner realizations along the way. My dogs and cats have been my teachers. People I've known have been my teachers. I've learned from books, from everyday life and from music. I've seen the Reagan Revolution undermine American democracy unto nullification, making our government by the corporations, of the corporations and for the corporations, with an anti-democracy supreme court. This progression began in 1963 with a corporate coup. Seeing our democracy slip away and the Constitution replaced by the police state document, the Patriot Act, has been a great sorrow to one who valued our democracy. It's history now. We'll have to wait until after a revolution and/or a civil war, a total economic collapse, the breakdown of American society, full involvement in Israel's aggression on Iran, after which reconstruction can begin in a whole new light. From my mountain I have seen the end of Democracy in America. Next: The decline and fall of the American Empire. Better to see it from a mountain than from a city.


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TED STERN INTERVIEW IN CofC MAGAZINE

ted stern by jack alterman

charleston magazine

The present edition of the College of Charleston magazine appeared in the mailbox a week or so ago. I flipped through it back to front briefly and put it down. On the cover is a blonde in pink boxing gloves, an '00 graduate. Inside, a picture of a sniper caught my eye, thinking, What? Of course. Snipers go to school someplace. It brought mental images from Tom Berringer's movies, Sniper one and two, and the third one literally son-of Sniper, though not cliched. I enjoyed every one of those movies. I like Tom Berringer as an actor, and saw the films as fictional documentaries giving an unrealistic movie version of an experience that I'm sure is not exactly the same, but enough to give a movie watcher a sense of that world, living in dense jungle with the grace of a wild animal. Having these three views of what it's like in the forest hunting and being hunted at the same time, I felt a profound respect for him. Though my initial response to the picture in the magazine was, What's a Guns N Ammo article doing in there? But a second or two of images from the films running through a slideshow in my head punched my awe button. I saw him for a moment reading the wind, figuring the distance in yards, the pull of gravity and force of the wind in relation to the particular gun he's using. It's impressive. It's impressive like driving in a nascar race at 200mph bumper to bumper, side to side in the pack.

I put the magazine down and left it, thinking about picking it up later to read the sniper article. A few hours ago I went into the kitchen to pour a cup of coffee. Returning to the chair I saw the babe in pink boxing gloves and picked up the magazine, thinking I'd read about her too. It's a cold, windy, overcast day, a good day for reading. I'd been in the first pages of a 1987 Chinese novel by Jia Pingwa, TURBULENCE. Howard Goldblatt translated it. It's so beautifully written that I foresee 500 pages of all-out good reading. He doesn't write like James Joyce, but has a quality that brings Joyce to mind. I can read a page from Turbulence and see it visually, feel like I understood an insight into a character, easy flow in the reading. I go back and read the page again; it's the same information, but it's so much more clear it's like I completely missed it the first reading, even when I got it, almost like I had never read it. I love that quality. I may reread frequently through it. Though it's translated into English, the writing is some of the very finest that characterizes contemporary Chinese writing in attention to detail, appreciation for subtleties, so visually written it's like watching a film.

I'd applied two colors to the new canvas earlier and was feeling good about getting a few things done and slowing down enough to read for awhile. Opened the magazine and there was Ted Stern's almost full-sized face looking exactly like he looks in this time of his life, which is not a great deal different from before. Under the picture it said, Wisdom Of The Century. I thought: somebody has been paying attention. I used to wonder if I'm the only one to see it. I only know a few people in his world, so I really have  nothing to go by, having no idea how other people see him, except that each one is uniquely itself. I looked at the next couple pages and saw him doing pushups on the wall, as he would do, the photo of the dedication of the Stern Center piece of what struck me very respectable architecture in a very functional occupation of its given space. I thought it a beautiful building. It carries the integrity of the campus's older architecture translated into the latter 20th Century. Inside, it feels spacious everywhere, plenty of room for a lot of people to flow in opposite directions at the same time. I was there for the christening and felt good for him; it was a major big day in his life, a monument to his devotion and his ability to get things done.

I'm remembering the day on his farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains, Air Bellows in Whitehead Township, where I worked as caretaker for seven years, '76-'83. He said, "I don't understand my successes and the money that has come to me. I don't know how to do anything." He was watching me sharpen the chainsaw during a break cutting firewood toward a long winter. I understood his meaning, because operating a riding lawn mower and a weed-eater were the apex of his mechanical abilities. I said to him something on the order of, Your work is of the mind. It pays better than making a chainsaw buzz. On the page opposite the dedication photo, a b&w of the Captain of the Ocean Sea, four gold bands on his sleeve, a studio portrait. Turn the page and there is the Ted Stern I know, sitting back holding a vodka and tonic with a quarter of a lime, the welcoming smile, the paper on the SPORTS section. I started reading a few sentences in the list of questions followed by an answer. Straight-ahead questions and straight-ahead answers. I read the columns of questions and answers backwards, not by intent, but the one at the top of the third column caught my eye and attention, then the one under it, then the one under it. It became amazing right away. I was hearing the Ted Stern I know answering these questions that by the end, in my case the beginning, gave a broad range of insight into the man most people know of making speeches, fund raising, talking on tv, in an office. This interview brought forward who the man is behind his decision-making that transformed the college and the city together.

Soon into it I couldn't stop reading. I was seeing the Ted Stern I've known over 40 years as I know the man. Question: Most critical item in a man's wardrobe. Answer: "I'm not a materialist. I don't think a man of honor or integrity, or a man of force needs physical attributes. He needs moral, social attributes to be successful." That is the Ted Stern I know. Another Question: Best lesson from the playground. Answer: "Be fair. Don't cheat." Reading over his answers on the pages, it sounds like him talking, like him thinking. I liked this form of interview better than the talkative kind. This interview covered a great deal of who Ted Stern is, better than an article about him. I felt like the content from this interview made a good preview to the biography Robert Macdonald is working on with what I believe is an integrity equal to Ted Stern's integrity. It tells me the biography will be the true story of a man whose ethics and attitude toward life have been good examples for me through the greater part of my adult life. The interview is online, can be found at: http://magazine.cofc.edu/2012/10/25/ted-stern-2/


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