THE CONFEDERATE FLAG GETS A NEW LIFE

larry rivers

My back goes up and stays up over this new spate of Yankee assaults on working class Southerners for failing to be their intellectual equals, for thinking differently from middle-class white people writing in Boston and New York offices. Insults fly, the air a swarm of arrows, like in a Chinese medieval war movie, arcing over the Mason-Dixon line aimed at cartoon visions of the South, Bugs Bunny and Yosemite Sam, unrepentant racists. I see quite a lot of it every day without looking for it. I don't comment or make anything of it, because I don't care what they think about the South. Just stay out of the South, stay up North where you belong, read about the South, write about the South and have opinions all you want, but stay home, please. One of my favorite of the slurs is the picture of a white flag said to be the only true confederate flag. I'd be happy to take that flag for my own, the flag of ultimate peace. As for confederate flag a flag of surrender, this only says whoever thought this one up does not know shit about the South or Southerners. My interpretation is they can't handle it that the South is an actual culture separate from their own absence of culture. 

larry rivers

It's the great American story, Be Like Me, going about believing they know more about other people's lives than the people living their own lives. I feel myself charged up inside over these Yankee assaults of blame on the Southern people over their identity around a flag that pisses Yankees off. Nobody in the South is going to say, Aw, poor Yankee got his feelings hurt. Yankees still don't get it the South does not back down. The civil war was an attack of aggression from the North. It was all fought on Southern land by Southern farm boys defending the homeland from a professional military machine. They were saying, and would have to the last man, Hell No, we will not submit. They'll have to defeat us again to make us give up the flag. There's nothing they can do and every redneck in the South knows it. In simple Southernese, they can go fuck theirselves. Aint nothin a bunch of fellers likes better'n self-righteous Yankees stayin at home. One of many things I embrace about the South is that I can get in my car, drive to Tennessee, Mississippi or Alabama, be comfortable and feel at home. My accent says I'm a friendly, part of the family, share the same belief system of what constitutes decent behavior. 

larry rivers

The South is not just a flag that most people in the South don't care about, anyway. A vast majority of Southerners don't care a lick about the flag, but a great many of them would stand firm against a Yankee assault against it. The most this media feeding frenzy on everything Southern has accomplished has been to recruit young white men to the klan. The klan may be the imaginary new confederate army defending the homeland from Yankee assaults, at least a powerful symbol. Nobody stands up for the South outside the South and Southerners mostly don't stand up for the South either, because they don't care what Yankees think of them, as much as Yankees don't care what Canadians think of them. Down here in the South we don't even think about the North except as an irritant that won't go away. We certainly do not entertain any secret desire to be like the North. Arrogance is the most frowned upon, least tolerated of human characteristics in the South. Yankee arrogance grates all the worse from the perspective of people who don't experience it much, left to themselves. 

larry rivers

First thing I saw when the finger-pointing and blame started piling up was a redneck reaction planned to give the Yankees a fit. Yesterday I saw something about an 8-mile long parade of cars and pickups, bikes too, flying the forbidden flag. I forget where. It doesn't matter where. Could be anywhere in the South. Like a school massacre can pop up anywhere in television viewing America. I saw something about amazon selling twice as many of the flags as before. Only historians know about the early 60s association with the flag in the South. Rebel boys, the only ones that make something of it, don't care about that. It is their rally flag, all the more now, identity as Southern rednecks like Hank Williams III and Larry the Cable Guy. Git-er-done. Our humor may not be as sophisticated as Yankee humor, but we don't care. We got better music. If they want to start taking down Southern monuments, they'd better be ready for unpredictable reaction. It's more corporate media stirring division for control, devoid of moral responsibility. This present round of Yankee efforts to shame Southern identity is just drawing us closer together under the canopy of Southern unity, a great big confederate flag that people are rallying to now, who didn't care anything about it before.    

larry rivers by larry rivers

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HIGHER UP THE MOUNTAIN

larry rivers

I'm seeing new reasons why I'm glad to live on Waterfall Road. Almost anywhere Appalachian would do, but this particular spot, my home, is the very place that will do. Every day when I see the news of the day before, it affirms a saying by a friend of several years ago, It's time to move higher up the mountain. I feel like I am in process of moving higher up the mountain again. My periods of moving higher up the mountain have been enough that I feel like a Himalayan climber; climb as much as you can in one day, set up a new camp with tents for sleeping in to go from there in first light. I'm satisfied with my separation from the worries of what is going on "out there," the world around me, the world of commerce. Alas, commerce is all that's going on out there. It's too boring to participate in. Anywhere I go I'm required to have money to spend. I stay home more than I ever have, and want to more. I don't know if I pay attention to current events and develop an attitude from what I learn there and project it onto the world around me, or if the human condition is getting as weird as it seems like it is. Or maybe I'm not the only one made crazy by media. I've found that when everybody is doing something, tv is the influence. The styles I see change in the people around me are from television. I can read the attitude of television seeing it in the people of my life, peaceable people not generating headlines. And for the first time in my life, I'm hearing somebody say every once in awhile, "I don't watch television anymore," or, "I don't watch much television." I seldom know what to say when somebody says they don't watch tv anymore. I want to tell them this is the beginning of a new and better life for them, but don't. I can't say I'm heartened to find a few people aren't paying tv any mind. I'm not an anti-television missionary. I figure it has its role for the people that need it. I don't need it, don't want it, can't tolerate it for myself, but don't believe it's necessary for me to browbeat anybody with my point of view. My point of view is my own. Your point of view is your own. I can appreciate yours without denying my own. What you can appreciate of mine does not deny your own.

larry rivers

It has happened several times in the last months that somebody I'm talking with mentions they don't watch television anymore. It comes about because I expect everybody around me is watching it, so I mention something I got from internet assuming they got it from television, and am told they don't watch. I'm wondering if this is a trend. Everyone who says they aren't watching it anymore says it almost apologetically, like they're admitting to feeling patriotism wane. I can't assess anything from my new findings that some people are turning away from its influence, though it feels good to see someone I know taking a turn toward a better life. Better in that the clutter of commercials jangling in their heads takes less precedence. I still have in my head commercials from the 1950s, the last decade I watched tv: halo is the shampoo that glorifies your hair; from the land of sky-blue wa-a-ters; he said that she said that he had halitosis; Meeska, mooska, mouska-teer, mouse cartoon time now is here. I've carried that nonsense in my head about all my life. Individually, memories of commercial jingles are more or less benign, but a head full of them from watching tv all my life would be maddening. I'd be a master at trivial pursuit. Back when I had the misfortune to be caught into playing Trivial Pursuit, the 1980s, I did terribly on the low score questions. They're all about television. People in the game would taunt me about not being able to answer the questions. You can do better than that. Like I'm not participating. Then we get into the high score questions and they're often from reading; suddenly, I'm scoring and they're not. I win and they're pist with me for my arcane reading. When rape is epidemic, look to television for the key. When cops killing people and saying he had a gun is epidemic, look to television for why. I call much of our social unrest artificial, because it is created by television, not by life circumstances. It is important to me for self to live everyday life ethically. I cannot have a head full of television and live ethically. Driving home from watching tv all afternoon on Sunday, the race, golf, football, basketball, baseball, at least a thousand commercials, my head is spinning and I need a week of no tv to be able to face it again the next Sunday.

larry rivers

Why do I do this to myself? Friends I watch the race with all work. The only chance we have to get together to visit is Sunday afternoon watching the race. It's not like cartoons, our attention can drift away from the tv and we can talk freely. It's like the tv is a focal point for us, the car we're riding in by way of metaphor. We talk and laugh, interact with Vada, watch her play. I started a game with Vada a few months ago, finding a coin in her ear. One day it occurred to me to find a dime in Vada's ear for a fun thing to do. Next visit, she turned her ear to me, "Do you see something in my ear?" I said, "No, I don't see anything right now. We'll look again in a little bit." To give myself a chance to scour my pocket without being seen. She knew what I was doing, but it was the game that was important. After a few times of pretending, I'd just take a coin out of my pocket and stick it in her ear and pull it out, gently, just enough so she can feel the coin with her ear. Sometimes I forget to take a coin and it's so disappointing to her I can't find money in her ear, I remind self to remember next time. It's become simply a way to give her a quarter each time I see her for her piggy bank. We both know that's what we're doing, but the game of pretending to find it in her ear is where we have the fun. It's more fun than handing it to her and telling her to put it in her piggy bank like a disinterested uncle. I wasn't even thinking about piggy bank. I do it for a play interaction, a game to play together. It's turned into something expected now, and that's ok. It's not the money in it that matters, but the play. I value in myself the freedom to play games with kids. I love about our coin in the ear game that we both know it is pretend. The fun is in the pretending, a game of fun like rolling a ball back and forth. An interaction that bridges the gap between a baby and a greatgrandpa figure is fun for both of us. I'm incomprehensibly far from her and she's incomprehensibly far from me. We have a gulf of experience between us, yet we find a way to communicate, like two people who speak different languages can find ways to communicate.

larry rivers

Some weeks ago, watching the race at Melvin's house, his girl, Beth, 13, told us she could talk to us in a way we would not understand anything she was saying and it would be perfectly clear to anybody at school. She also told us anybody that likes Star Wars is a geek. Not only do we have years of experience between old and young now, we have generation gaps. There are so many generation gaps between me and Beth, the bridge is one of those rope bridges that is one person at a time. It made me laugh, took me back to 1955 when I was 13 and rocknroll was in its beginnings, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Bo Diddley, Bill Haley, Elvis, Buddy Holly, and new words were "hep." That's Fifties hip. It changed in the Sixties, anyway for the white young. Cool was new. Every other word was crazy. Bill Haley had a song, Crazy Man Crazy. We had a new language coming in with the new music. Pop was new. Parents were partial to the big band sound and Frank Sinatra. "Rocknroll will never last," they said. Alas for them, it was big band and Sinatra that didn't last. I see a similar change has occurred with the cell phone generation. Like the band Government Mule. They're still recording and doing concerts. It doesn't mean they're the latest word for hip. I feel like such a gap has occurred again. Rocknroll has become irrelevant. Only parents and grandparents still listen to it, largely. The music has changed radically. Rocknroll is now one of a thousand genres. After a quarter century of punk, the original punk ideal has come into play, the freedom to do whatever musical expression trips your trigger. It's in this same way cultures become irrelevant. Old time mountain culture has zero relevance for now. The oldest people who lived it are long in their graves. The greater American culture that television has guided will change too. There will come a time geologists will be unearthing our tombstones too. I've watched the changes all along my way, until by now I'm glad I got to see it, because I wondered how rocknroll would eventually become irrelevant, wondered if I'd live to see the change. There are so many generation gaps between me and the people around me that I've learned to communicate in that place where you don't need the same common language or culture. It's a curious time. We're conforming with all our might and individuating to the same degree. All I know to do is roll with it.    

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CAN'T CONNECT WITH FRANK O'HARA

     larry rivers, I like olympia in black, 1970

Have been reading in Frank O'Hara's ART CHRONICLES 1954-1966. It is a collection of esssays from a magazine he was involved with as an associate editor, Art and Literature, where these essays originally appeared. He also worked at the Museum of Modern Art and wrote a good bit of poetry. The book was published in 1975 and I've had my copy since about that time. Seeing the spine on the bookshelf, I was thinking it would be a good time to look at it, as I hadn't paid much attention to it in awhile and he wrote about artists whose work I appreciate, the abstract expressionists. Reading in it, I realized I had read in it before. This time I was looking at an interview with Larry Rivers.

O'Hara's questions struck me as very poor interview questions, yet each one sent Rivers into a long paragraph of talking. What he drew out of Rivers I found did not satisfy my reasons for reading the article, to find some possible insight into Larry Rivers' painting. I came away disappointed, but didn't really know why. Started the essay on Robert Motherwell, recognizing I'd read it before, but that was so far away as not to matter. Read ten pages, wondered, what am I reading? He hadn't told me a thing about Motherwell's painting that opened to any insight for me. It was all information, nickel knowledge information. The information didn't even give an insight into the character of Motherwell or his painting. I quit reading it and realized this has happened before with this book over the last almost 40 years.

It takes me back to remembering why I've never been an enthusiast for Frank O'Hara's poetry. It never spoke to me. Like his prose writing, it seems like information for the sake of information. I feel like rejecting him like I have is not the way to handle O'Hara, because he is "cool" and "famous" and ran in the right circles to be totally cool. Cool people praise his writing and talk about what a great guy he was. Mighta been. I'm recalling past efforts of mine to give O'Hara a break, considering that I haven't yet given him his due, maybe if I read something now I'll get it. Maybe before, I didn't get it. Over and over I've found he leaves me uninterested in what he's writing about very quickly. I stopped reading about Motherwell when I realized after 10 pages I'd found nothing that reveals anything about what Motherwell was reaching toward. I found O'Hara has no depth in his writing. It's the same with his poetry. I used to wonder why cool people spoke and wrote so highly of him and I couldn't find any reason to read any of the poems I saw a second time.

O'Hara in these essays shows me the reason I've not been able to read him with any pleasure in the past is that he's a surface-skimmer. I've no problem with that as a legitimate style, but it's of no interest to me to read information for the sake of information. O'Hara wrote historical context very well, understood the evolution of art in the 20th Century. For me, his writing lacks life. When I finish one of his essays I feel like I haven't read anything, like I've been sitting here dozing off. His thinking, going by the questions in the Rivers interview, didn't appear to run very deep. I've never found an O'Hara poem I can say I like, and these essays, again, have only disappointed by giving no insight into a period of art I like a lot. Writing about art is not a bit easy. I'm not so wound up over Clement Greenberg's writing about abstraction, though Harold Rosenberg's writings on the abstract expressionists satisfies what I'm looking for when I want to read about art. I don't mean to make claims that one is the greatest and the other is not. Just noting my own subjective take on them.

A black bear ran by the window. It ran past the birdfeeder to the road, across the road and up the bank the other side. At first, I thought it was a black dog, but it was a little too much like loping for a dog. Running up the bank, it's fat rolling all over its body lumbering without hesitation up the steep embankment faster than a dog could, I saw clearly this was, indeed, a bear and not a dog. At the top of the bank it stopped and showed me its profile with its light brown snout. Beautiful bear. Caterpillar is looking out the screen door suspiciously. Could be she smelled it or heard the alarm in Martha's voice.. Martha barked at it briefly and made like she wanted to run after it. Satisfied to see it leave her territory of its own accord, she stopped this side of the road. She knew what it was, probably ten times her weight, big claws, big teeth, and absolutely wild.

    


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