MY SOUTHERN BRIER PATCH

tony smith

New Year's day I spent mostly in the bed. Didn't want to do anything. Didn't want to be awake. Read some between naps in a new biography of Vincent Van Gogh. Today I passed the half way point. It's 900 pages.Woke a few minutes to seven, thinking it morning. The weather report on the radio for Friday was "tomorrow." I thought, you mean today. Today is Friday. I remembered I was waking from a nap--oh no, it's not tomorrow yet--it's evening. Friday morning I need to get with mechanic, tie the car door closed with baling twine and drive to his shop, taking back roads, to see if he can fix it. I hope it doesn't involve two hundred dollars in parts, or more. Happy New Year. This morning I found the owner's manual, looked up the fuses and pulled the fuse that works the interior lights to avoid running down the battery. I tried everything someone with no experience in such matters could think of. New Years. Things like this tend to happen to me on Friday evening after five o'clock. I have to wait til Monday to make an appointment for help. If mechanic cannot get to it tomorrow, the highest likelihood, I'll have to wait through the weekend til next week. Here again, when frustration reaches the point I can't stand it, I pull back into indifference. It only means I can't go anyplace for almost a week. Good. Like getting snowed in. Plenty of catfood, birdseed and carrots to last a week. Don't need a prescription filled for another week. Turns out it was a good time to be immobilized. Nothing to do but accept. As long as I'm staying at home, I'm not spending money. Money goes a lot further when I stay home. Staying home consumes no gasoline. And it's where I want to be anyway. Don't throw me in the brier patch. 

tony smith

I think of Brer Rabbit from the Disney film, Song of the South, tales of Uncle Remus, that I saw age 6. My only memory was Brer Rabbit (me) caught by some characters that wanted to hurt him. They were talking of what they could do to him. Brer Rabbit said, "You can do anything, but please don't throw me in the brier patch." It struck his captors a good idea. They threw him in. He hopped among the briers, tapping a bunny dance, singing, "I was born in a brier patch." More than likely, this was my first acquaintance with the South. I loved the movie, loved the Southern accent, loved the characters. This is age 6. I've been searching for my first discovery of the South as a place and hadn't been able to trace it past a biography read in third grade of Robert E Lee. Looking for why the interest in Lee, the South. The Uncle Remus stories must have been my very first introduction to the South. I do remember identifying so fully with Brer Rabbit that his plea, don't throw me in the brier patch, has stayed with me all my life. I think it taught me that cleverness of mind trumps brawn. I had the metaphor of brawn sitting beside me. I already knew he had no brains. I'm hearing Chuck Berry sing in my head, "You can't catch me, oh no, you can't catch me." As soon as I had my freedom, I headed for the South. You'll never catch me in the South. Maybe the South is my brier patch. I've found that people outside the South are largely afraid of the South. My brier patch. To say I loved a movie at age six has no bearing on if I might like it now. Age 11, I saw Demetrius and the Gladiators, starring Victor Mature. It was so sentimental, I loved it, cried at the end. Mid-twenties, I was in somebody's house while it was playing on the tv. I watched a scene and gagged. Victor Mature made me puke. How could I have ever liked such a thing? Eleven. I liked Mighty Mouse too. 

tony smith

Live oak trees, Spanish moss, the Southern accent, the Solid South at election times, my symbols of the South. I knew about slavery and the Civil War from school. I was partial to the South in history class. Didn't know the politics of the South until after school when the Civil Rights movement was cranking up. Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee, Bo Diddley, Elvis Presley, Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks, later to become The Band, were from the South. The South is where rock n roll was conceived and born. The Carter Family were Southern Appalachian hillbillies in the time before electricity and plumbing arrived in the mountains. Mountain people listened to them on radios that worked from Model T batteries. I had never listened to the Carter Family until I'd been in the mountains a quarter century. The church I went to had Carter Family gospel songs in the hymnal. Hearing Carter Family the first time, I recognized several of their songs. Being able to understand and feel the Carter Family is one of the great blessings of my life. The Carter Family songbook, over 500 songs they recorded, is the songbook for Southern Appalachian old-time and bluegrass, songs AP Carter found traveling up and down the mountains looking for songs. For me, The Carter Family makes a greater icon for the South than any general or politician. The Carter Family are the Southern people, the white people, the culture I live in. I love to hear Sara Carter sing like I love to hear Lucinda Williams sing. 

tony smith

Going by Southern politicians, the rest of the country takes all of us for racist bigots. That's ok. Keeps em away. It's never 100% of the vote that goes to the politician appealing to racism. They most often win an election, though not by much more than 50%. I am here to learn the South and the mountains, not to judge the South or want to change it. I would like to see less racism, but that time will come. It's an historical progression involving belief systems with religion woven in, a mythology. It's slow to change. Like all healing, it takes time. Racism comes from ignorance, and willful ignorance is the slowest to change. This form of ignorance is all over the country. Michelle Bachmann is from Massachusetts. Ted Cruz is from Texas-Canada-Cuba, went to Harvard Law school. He aint Suthun. Bobby Jindal is from India and went to Oxford. Evidently, ignorance has nothing to do with education. It's like the meme that reappears on facebook, You can't fix stupid. Those people are avoidable anywhere, except maybe in an elevator. I stay away from them. They know I'm a liberal and they stay away from me first. Works out just right. As I like to be received for who I am, I like to receive others for who they are. I don't care that some of the people I know are racists. It weakens my respect for them, but that's all. Each one has his and her own history, same as I have mine. I like to know individuals for who they are, not a pretense made up for show. If I judge them, they don't let me know who they are. If I were to judge them for being racist, I'd be a racist about white rednecks. Individually, person to person, I prefer to stay out of their politics and mine. I'm of the old-time way of sitting around the wood-stove, spitting in tin cans, talking about anything but politics and religion. I save these subjects for the blog.  

tony smith

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WAITING FOR MIDNIGHT

pat monk

Already I have changed the wall calendar. Last year I waited a couple weeks into January, not for any reason but laziness. I like the Ramon calendar, big numbers, easy to make notes on. The hardware store used to give them out, then had to start charging for them, then quit having them. My bank gives them out now. One way or another, I'm still able to find one. Asked a couple days ago what my annual ritual is for New Year's. all I could think of was changing the calendar. We have the calendar New Year, the astrological New Year, the Chinese New Year, etc. Celebrate them all? Celebrate one? I pick the social New Year, Jan 1, the one the people around me celebrate. I have a hard time with one date as New Year's. It's like taking a ballpoint pen and marking a point on a child's rubber ball, saying this spot marks the beginning. How else would you place the spot but arbitrarily? To find out why January 1 is purportedly the first day of the new year, it would take looking at the history of the calendar we go by. My personal preference would be the astrological new year, the spring equinox, which seems it would be the more universal calendar. The other new year dates are specific to given cultures. Yet, I prefer these calendars. In Greece a long time ago, 1972, I brought home a Greek Orthodox calendar, a whole new way of looking at a year. Almost every day has something to do with a saint. Maybe they are more personal than the universal, have customs that go back multiple centuries, millennia. They need translation from one to the other like languages. I also prefer multiple languages to one. Switzerland prints three languages on their paper money, Italian, German and French. American white people want only English on our money, while the American reality is at least two languages. 

pat monk

I had a party to go to, one I wanted to go to, that didn't work out. I dressed up for a late night out in the cold, went out to start the car, hooked up the GPS, and the door would not latch. I could not close it. I can't go anyplace with an open door. The interior light was on, bitter cold winter night. I took the bulb out of the overhead light. I could not approach the problem with the door latch in the dark and intense cold. I raised the hood and looked with flashlight at what it would take to remove the ground cable from the battery. Naturally, it's a battery with new posts it takes a special tool to work with, a tool I don't have. Another light stays on inside that I can't remove the bulb from. Early in the morning, I'll try to start the motor, to let it charge the battery a little until I can find a way to fix the door. Something like this happens every winter on a bitter cold night. The car is 22 years old. The motor and running parts are perfect. It's the electrical, brake lines, external parts on the engine that are giving out. Every time I replace a part, it's new. I'd rather pay a mechanic to maintain an old car than make payments on a new one. I'd rather my money, energy, go toward a man making a living independently by his knowledge and skill, than pay into corporate police state. I call it living what I believe. I prefer the world of individuals to the corporate hive, the reason I live where I live. All my needs can be fulfilled locally. Friends ask why I don't go to Walmart for something I can get there for less than in Sparta. It's a ten dollar round trip to the nearest Walmart. Add ten dollars to whatever I might want at Walmart, and I'm better off to buy in Sparta. I don't want to go into Walmart anyway. For me, it's a moral issue. Walmart tramples the rights of individuals and regards their employees the same as cattle. I can't support that, even buying no more than socks.

pat monk

New Year's and Christmas, the holiday season, is a social time. It's about mixing with other people, having a spirited time, party time. I'm not one for standing around at a party with drink in hand playing pretend charming. I say, if that's what you gotta do, go for it. I prefer to stay at home most of the time. I can't blow party whistles, put on a pointy little hat and act like I'm almost three. I'm not a reveler. I've never had that kind of physical freedom. Inhibited. My preference is to stay at home and let other people act out the social part. I'm one of the people who call Christmas and New Year's just another day. My friend Jr Maxwell saw it the same. One New Year's Eve we decided to sit at the table with our drams and wait for midnight. By the time 12 rolled around, both our foreheads were touching the table. We had more to drink than usual. Both of us were drunk. Twelve o'clock was the end of our vigil. We could have taken another drink, but it would have put us on the floor. We didn't want to go there. We sat at the table talking for six hours. We came away from it thinking it the best New Year's ever. I don't recall a New Year's party that was more fun than we had at the table talking, laughing, getting freer and looser as time went by, talking stupid and laughing at everything. By twelve, only the force of will kept us awake. We were drinking liquor that was at least 140 proof, delicious liquid candy. Liquor affects different people differently. Both Jr and I were happy drunks making it possible for us to drink together in excess. Instead of getting red-faced and looking for a fight, we dissolved in laughter. Jr was one of the funniest people I've known. He kept me laughing for hours at a time.

pat monk

A day came to mind when Jr was in his frailty, though still had his mind. A friend of his dropped by one afternoon. He had a quart of liquor with blueberries in it he'd kept on a shelf for twenty years. Jr and I were sitting at our ends of the long sofa, each with our own table lamp. Friend drove up and came in the door already pretty far along. He stepped over to the couch, told me to get on over, meaning move to he middle of the couch, he wanted my spot. Ok. He pushed me with his upper arm. I caught a whiff of his aura of alcohol. He told great stories from past experience that kept both Jr and me bent over laughing much of the time. I'd never been this close to him before, and felt some powerful energy radiating from him, powerful energy. My feeling took it for the immense anger he carries. This is somebody that when when the guns come out, you want him on your side. He is comfortable with red-faced men looking for a fight. His face is twisted like a Picasso face from battering. The bones in his hands are so crushed that his outer three knuckles sank back about a half inch from usual. He told me that when a man first goes into prison, he thinks he knows how to fight. First thing he learns is he doesn't know anything about fighting. The liquor was so good that over the course of an hour or more, the three of us drank the whole quart. Friend kept us rolling with laughter telling comic stories. He is a comedian. He likes to make people laugh. Jr and I were a great audience for him. I won't tell about his stories. They are all "inappropriate," racist, fascist. His opinions make Rush Limbaugh sound discreet. I would be asked to leave DCP if I were to retell any of his stories. The real comedy was in the telling more than the stories themselves. I've seen Jr almost fall out of his chair at the table laughing at friend's telling of one of his stories. They weren't necessarily true. That part didn't matter, the same as a number on a calendar ultimately does not matter.

pat monk himself

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A NEW YEAR AHEAD

Jessica stockholder

We're into a new annual cycle, and it starting with a new moon. A good time to start new projects. Ruth at the facebook artist group, Daily Creative Practice, asked everyone to make a statement about what we envision for ourselves through the course of 2014. Not a resolution, but what one sees on the horizon, so to speak, the direction one is moving, projects in sight. Intent. Seeing that it's a new moon, it's a good time to address intent. I'm not one to look that far ahead, a year ahead, so this thinking is new for me. I prefer not to think about the future, except to look at the evolution of police state that has trumped American democracy, view changes in the progression of specifically American fascism, and the changing cartography that will go with global warming. I pay attention to it for self-preservation. Like I know not to use the word Be Oh Hem Be. Or Hen Eye Gigi He Are. NSA will nail me with insta-word check for key words. I'll end up in the deepest darkest dungeon under the maximum security prison in Alaska for using forbidden language. YOU CAN'T SAY THAT! I just did. Targeted potential terrorist. He used the B-word. I figure everything I write here is surveilled in a nanosecond when I click on the publish button. That's the internet landscape as I see it, all of it reviewed by NSA with word check. A satellite can see a quarter in my driveway. I don't see this Snowden episode changing anything. It's a surprise speed-bump for the propagandists and no more.  

 

jessica stockholder

 

I saw the young actress Jennifer Lawrence, whose name I only know because I saw her on the Jon Stewart show,  is campaigning with her celebrity influence to eliminate the word FAT from the language. Now we have another forbidden F-word. Issues of forbidden words have been going on in my homeland for several years now. You really have to watch what you say around white middle-class women. I've become so weary of watching what I say around them that I just make it clear when you're around me, you're on your own where handling forbidden language is concerned. I'm not vulgar, but I'm not obedient to priestesses of Political Correctness either. Get in my face and you just might make me laugh. We have an alphabet now of forbidden words that you get fired on television for saying. It's as bad as the preacher's wife syndrome in the old days. The preacher and his old-lady disapproved. Whatever it was, they disapproved. Middle-class women who get bent over the alphabet of forbidden words have fun disapproving of me. I'll never forget a brief conversation with a white middle-class woman I've been acquainted with for several years when she was informing me the N-word needed to be banned from the dictionary, "and while they're at it, they can ban the C-word." I thought: Oh no, another letter of the alphabet with a banned word! I said in jest, "What is it, Cool?" Answer in no uncertain terms, "No! CUNT!!!" I said, "Oh." I did not see that coming. I couldn't imagine what a C-word would be. Colored? Coon?

 

jessica stockholder

 

All this time we're throwing away our freedom of speech as something reprehensible in need of controls, I'm in awe to see the American people, after two-thirds of a century of television, don't want democracy or freedom of speech, these precious aspects of America The Land Of The Free our flag stands for. Not just let fade away, but thrown out like broken children's toys. In the Fifties it was called the Throw-Away Society. We're so far advanced in tossing out that we're spoiled by it like we're spoiled with what we want by Wal-Mart. We've gone from landfills to making mountains of trash. I remember seeing a trash mountain beside I-95 near Stuart, Florida, that was so high the bulldozer on top looked like a matchbox toy. I point to television, because it has rendered the American people collectively unconscious. It's purpose. Crowd control. It worked. Keep the masses ignorant and they vote republican. Like it matters how they vote. It's a game, like a card game, a cyber poker game between propagandists using hate to divide us into Us against Them. Divide and conquer. Because I see how conquered we-the-people are, I can't involve myself in paying attention to politics or the news anymore. I say "paying attention to." I hear it on radio a time or two a day and see internet bits of current events, but will never again let political, religious, or ideological influence clutch at my heart with a pang that says: It hadn't oughta be that way. Maybe it hadn't oughta, but the Titanic hadn't oughta neither.

 

jessica stockholder

 

Because this is how I see the world that is the landscape I live in, I chose to abandon a life of supporting the military machine USA has evolved into. Fear created and cranked up by the tv to a stress level that longs for security. Tv cop shows kill offenders, criminals, the unspeakable word, the enemy. I choose every day not to live in such mind. Even though I am not manipulated by the corporate belief system directly through television, I get it from everybody around me. I live in television culture even though I don't watch it. I see it once a week for a few hours. It reminds me why I care nothing for it. I'm grateful to God every day for landing my parachute on a back road in the Blue Ridge Mountains where I need a gun to take a walk in the woods anymore. I see images of cities around the world in movies and feel claustrophobic. I remember standing on the highest point in London and seeing city to horizon all the way around. It was the reverse of being at sea out of sight of land. The place I'm located geographically and mentally is about as good as, "at sea out of sight of land," as is reasonably accessible. I don't want to live someplace it takes a Land Rover to get to. I'm ok with a road running by the house. I'm ok with neighbors. I need trees desperately. I can't participate in the mind that values only money and the appearance of money. Tv is about money and money only. I don't value money. A guy in a gold-chrome Cherokee wanted to buy my house one day. I told him it's not for sale. He said there is a price I would sell it for. I laughed. Didn't say it because it wouldn't sound the way it was meant, I don't think you know who you're talking to. Our conversation went nowhere.

 

 

 

jessica stockholdeer

 

A month ago I decided to let go of listening to the news in any form. I asked myself one day, Why am I giving attention to people like Ted Cruz, Sarah Palin, Bachman, Boner, Mitch and Paul? Any of them? I have no respect for anyone involved in American government anymore, would cross the street to avoid one. I need to get my mind out of that thinking. I say that's the landscape I live in, but it's not only that. It is that if I turn it on. I have a choice. To turn it on, or not to turn it on. It is my creation. I scroll through the facebook political images that used to amuse me as if they were commercials, which they are, propaganda commercials. The republicans are taking us on a downhill run, I can't stop it, and I don't like to watch it. I see it enough at the grocery store, rising prices and the huff-n-puff swat-team mind of town cops these days. State cracking down on citizens with outrageous fees for everything. Mandatory sentencing and outrageous prison sentences. I'm so paranoid about getting out in the world anymore, I want to stay home all the time. I'm stuck to it and there's nothing I can do but acquiesce, stay at home, draw minimal attention to myself, watch international movies, read international books, pay attention to international art. I can ignore as much as possible, while at the same time not being in denial. I know what it is to my own satisfaction and praise God every day for the insight to get out of that mind. Beyond the writing and the art projects for 2014, I want to separate myself even further from concern about anything to do with American politics. I want to hear American political news with the same dispassion as if it were North Korean news. I want to sit with picture books of Ai Wei Wei, Larry Rivers, Robert Irwin, Robert Mangold, Constantin Brancusi, books in reach of where I sit. I tell myself to look at art more, not corporate mind-rot.     

 

jessica stockholder

 

 

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DAYS GO BY

the empty chair

These pictures are from the year 2010, yesterday. The snow melted in the night and this morning the air is fog, the ground mushy mud, a little bit of wind, enough to keep the wind chimes tinkling and sometimes a rush of chimes. Overnight, the weather changed from a month of bitter cold and ice to 48 degrees now and infrequent tiny patches of snow. A radical weather change with the new year. I won't try to think of that as a sign or anything like that. It could be, but I don't get it. It's a welcome coincidence. I have seen, however, that what we call coincidence tends to be a divine moment of connect with one's flow. It is what it is.

Everything is what it is and it's illusion for me to ever think I have any control over anything but myself, and not much there. I have a little bit of self control, but none to brag about. I'm able to stop myself from jumping into a gun fight or saying something disrespectful to Anderson Silva about his mutha. Anybody can do that, so it's not saying something special. That's kind of kindergarten self-control. Doubt I'm far past the 4th grade, if that far along. Not interested in resolutions for the new year, because whatever they are, they're not even remembered by the end of the year, or end of the month. And I'm not sure Jan 1 is anything but a calendar first day. It seems more like March 21 is the solar first day. There is certainly a reason Jan 1 is the chosen date. It's probably something I "learned" in school and it's gone. It has the familiarity of something maybe read about in the distant past with no recollection of what it was. Might google it later if it continues a concern. Doubt it will.

At this time, I don't feel like a review of last year matters in any way. The future, including the rest of this day, is opaque but for mental projections along the transition from Aldous Huxley's vision of the future to George Orwell's, according to momentum. I prefer to look at it as everyday life at home in the world of people I feel close with, not think beyond what is going on immediately in my world, in here, with minimum regard for forces out there. I can't quite do that because the spread of mega-corporate discount stores has shut down the town that is in my community, Sparta, and has already shut Whitehead down and out. Those big forces "out there" reach "in here." I can't change them, but like to be aware of them. Thirty years ago our corporate oligarchy froze wages for working people by now unable to keep up with inflation. In my community, people make the same income they made 30 years ago, and grocery, etc, prices have tripled. Next will be quadrupled, not far away. For the last 30 years there has been only the most minimal maintenance on the Parkway due to cuts in budget to fund the military so much it was an embarrassment for them. Now with "stimulus" money they're shutting down our section of the Parkway a few years for maintenance, money borrowed from China.

I feel more like today, Jan 1, is just another day. Waking this morning, it was the morning after last night, like all other mornings follow the night before. This morning was so foggy it looked like snow on first looking out the window. The snow and ice is soaking into the ground to raise the water table a bit. I'd say my last year was a very good year, and felt like it was a good year for the people in my world. We've been happy, or so it seems. I feel like the next cycle of a year will be another good year with good friends. I don't quite know what I mean by a "good" year, unless getting through it is a good thing. In the course of a year not everything is sweetness and light. It is possible that a single event can make an entire year a sorrow, and the other way too, that one event can make a year of joy. Either way, that's just part of it. For the most part, it's sorrows and joys hand-in-hand. 2011 is the year before 2012, the year at the end of the Mayan calendar. I can't help but think that what follows every Dec 31 is Jan 1. The last day or year of a cycle is the one before the first again, no seam. Like the sun coming up.

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