BLESSINGS THESE DAYS

donkey jen's blessing miss ed

Day after day I see on facebook people posting an announcement of being blessed by having some feel-good experience. Most of the time I feel like barfing because it drips with oozing sentiment like fart putty. Sometimes I agree, it was indeed a blessing. Then I question what the word blessing means and why I never say it. It's like the word luck. We make our own luck. In like manner, we make our own blessings. I think about times I've called something a blessing, I find that I feel more blessed having whatever it is that makes it possible to notice a given experience as a blessing. It's there whether or not I receive it a blessing. My friends Crystal and Justin had their baby girl, who I consider a major blessing in my life. I've slowed way down and lost interest in an awful lot, become so disappointed by civilization, I've indrawn to the world of my home, my mountain glen in the beautiful Blue Ridge among my four-legged friends. I only see people I care about who care about me. I've let go of associations with toxic people. It really makes a difference when they're gone. And it makes a difference when a vibrant baby enters.

 

miss ed's fifth day in a donkey body

 

Over the last few years I've alienated three people I thought of as friends, because they wore me out. Constantly telling me what to do, what to read, what to, what to, sentences all starting with you needta, you gotta, you oughta, you should. Can't we just sit still and talk about something, like have a conversation about something having to do with something besides measuring how deficient I am as a model of you. They got on my last nerve to the point I had to shake them off, never felt a pixel of guilt. I hear Patti Smith in my head in her Babelogue intro to Rock n Roll Nigger, "I'm an aMERican artist, I feel NO guilt." So Patti Smith. The times I see tv, this is what I see, continuous you-oughta. I amuse my friends talking back to commercials, saying things like, "No, I don't think I will." Nationwide is on your side. "Not." It's a blessing not to have so-called friends in my face missionarizing empiricism to me, what's right.

 

miss ed one ear up

 

I used to think it cynical of men my age laughing at me thinking principles important in my youth. It wasn't many years ago I came to I don't give a shit about what's right, it's so subjective. Because it works for me is no reason it would work for somebody else. Our karmic make-up must be at least as complex and specific as our DNA. I'm of a mind that it's ok guys have long hair, girls have blue hair, both have tattoos and dress imaginatively. Somebody says to me, "the kids these days," in a disgusted tone of voice, I make a case for the kids these days by telling a little bit of what I've seen getting in among the kids these days and finding they are incredible people. I like all the kids-these-days I know, like them a lot. I don't bore them too badly because I'd rather listen to them tell me what they have to say than be the one talking. I'm a good listener because I really do want to hear what they have to say. They're good people. They have beautiful things to say. Going by the kids these days I've known, I feel like their generation is closer to the heart than my generation

 

jenny and her five day old baby

 

The day after going to a show of Daniel Biggins' band, The Seduction, waking up next morning, taking carrots to donkeys, I feel blessed. The experience of a small place playing rock n roll the way I want to hear it feels to me like a blessing. The blessing part in it, in my subjective case, is that I am able to receive an experience as a blessing. It is, indeed, a blessing that I have three babies in my life that I love with all my heart, and one long-distance. A kitten, a donkey, Vada and Teddy. I feel buoyed up by the new energy right here, one inside the house, the other just out the door. Kids these days. I pay attention to all the kids I know, from babies on up, find them, every one, interesting people. I value their humanity, their lives. It's been known about me for years in a big group of people they can find me among the kids, listening to them and watching them play. I just sit in a chair or on a step and watch. I've watched Weird Al videos with a roomful of kids laughing, all of them kids I'd known since they were born. I feel the same among the animals I've learned to know. Sometimes I stand at the fence and watch the donkeys in their lives together, sometimes go out and sit in the meadow among them, listen to them graze, tell them I'm happy they're in my life.  

 

miss ed watches mama eat her grain

 

 

 

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IT'S ALL ILLUSION ANYWAY

john sloan

 

It has been with me all day today that I have lived my life poor by choice. Went to further education with ambition to make more money, have a nice car, a few really nice suits, a nice place with a good sound system. The Fifties American teenage dream. By the time I'd finished schooling, I didn't want any of it, mostly on moral grounds. Those were the years of developing my morality to live by. Continuous church from age six to eighteen, I was in flight from religion through the college years, wanted no more to do with it. I'd learned no  morality to live by, only No, Don't, and You Better Not. I wanted to break the rules, commit taboo, and, at the same time, look for a real morality to live by. The morality of you-better-not was a coffin. For somebody growing up into his unknown life, I did not want to live my life in the grave. Much as I resent, still, the overkill browbeating of a dead religion throughout my early years, I see in retrospect it set me on my spiritual path as a natural consequence of recognizing what I had was fake, inspiring a search for what is real. Then the question, what makes something real and something else fake?

 

john sloan

 

I looked for a lot of years at that one. In illusion, what's the difference? Start over with collectively agreed upon reality, the reality of the scientific method, physical reality. Kick a table leg barefoot, it hurts. Duality: pain and pleasure, right and wrong, high and low, in and out, to and from, the wedding of heaven and hell. In this reality I attempt to distinguish real from fake with no guidelines or rule book or discourses to go by. I have to go by intuition, by feeling. I recall my friend John, whose bookstore I worked in through the college years, who grew up Catholic, and had the same allergic reaction I had to Fundamentalism, threw the baby out with the bathwater. He called himself an atheist and I understood his reasoning. He was, at once, the most moral human being I have known, along with a few others I've known in the mountains. He kept a quotation from Shakespeare on the wall in the store that I saw a hundred times a day, To thine own self be true and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man. I found it to be so in John, and over the years found it to be true in myself. In a real sense, this is the foundation of the morality I live by. More has grown on top of this, though more or less subtle versions of same. The morality I've come into on my own is not restrictive. It expands.

 

john sloan

 

 

In the dark is the seed of the light---in the light is the seed of the dark. In my time of agnostic thinking and atheist thinking, this quotation from Shakespeare of being true to self was an everyday point in the life, the core of my moral thinking. I didn't need any more verses to memorize of God sez. I needed something to live with that had practical application, something that was not a s'posed-to, but made sense, something I could see applying it in everyday life would, indeed, improve the quality of one's life. I believed God in the early part of the life, but such a twisted version I could not live with it as a rational, or even semi-rational human being, but in denial of my humanity. In the time I was seeking my humanity. Early part of the life, God was Fear. Later part of the life, God is Love. The seeking part in between had in it the seed, To thine own self be true. It is the mountain ethic, be who you are. John has been true to himself all the way along, is now 103, still has a clear mind. When it comes to truly honest people I've known, I'd say more than you'd think, because sometimes I think of a liar as true, true to who he is. Sometimes the lies are self-defense by vulnerable people, and there are an awful lot of different vulnerabilities going around.

 

john sloan

 

What does this have to do with why I live poor? It has everything to do with it. I live below the poverty level and the taxes due from my labor is no support to American military rule of the world and the American people. I do not support it morally, and I do not support it with the fruits of my labor. It's not about politics. It's about morality. Like a conscientious objector. I live simply in order not to pay into the military machine that kills poor people all around the globe and at home. I don't support it morally, and cannot contribute to it with my labor. Patti Smith sings in my head, Outside of society, that's where I wanna be. I live in a self-titled Christian society that hates the poor, the vulnerable, the down and out. How can I live with a moral conscience  in this society and not be one of the poor? I live simply by choice, and in one way of looking at it, by empathy. It's different from being put out of your work and your home. Thanks to Social Security, it bypasses the desolation. I can look the truly poor people I know and come in contact with straight in the eye with understanding, them not feeling like I think I'm coming from a higher place than they are. A few weeks ago I saw someone I know who is the poorest of the poor in every way, we talked awhile and my heart glowed with love for this guy I've known since he was a child, who was born with everything against him, keeps on going with another woman taking care of him, and all I could think was, There but for the grace of God go I. It was a powerful moment. I made myself leave before falling into weeping. I don't want to pay taxes to my government that will not help people unable to help themselves. It's that simple.  

 

 

john sloan by john sloan

 

 

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THANKFUL FOR LITTLE RICHARD

I went to YouTube to find a video of Little Richard singing Jenny Jenny. Found several and watched three, shaking my head, cracking up, loving it, jamming to Little Richard again. It took me back to high school years listening to Little Richard on 45s, buying the new one as it came out as quick as I could get it. Jenny Jenny was one of his rockers I liked a lot. It was 1957 punk. In that time, I could have had only Little Richard records and been satisfied. I listened to the other music because it was there, but Little Richard satisfied my soul. Seeing him today, fifty-eight years later, half a century, I have a donkey named Jenny and sometimes say to her, Jenny Jenny Jenny, hearing Little Richard in my head. His songs are tattooed on the inside of my skull. Seeing Little Richard perform in 1968 was not quite the same as Little Richard in 1958. In the ten years between, he'd left rock n roll, threw a big diamond ring in a river and went to preaching. Later, he went back to rock n roll, fell in with cocaine and a Sixties rock star lifestyle until it wore him out. He left rock n roll and went back to preaching. I think it was in my second winter in the mountains I saw in the Winston-Salem Journal that Little Richard would be preaching at Winston-Salem State College. Of course, I drove to the city to hear this. I never had a chance to see Little Richard perform his music, and here was a chance to see the other side of Little Richard, the preacher. He was good, had stage charisma to the max. He walked back and forth along the edge of the stage, dressed in black, looking like a black leopard pacing back and forth behind cage bars. He didn't do emotional religion. He talked rationally, a man who thought about things. 

little richard

He was down on rock n roll, saying it was of the devil, that he was serving the devil when he was playing rock n roll. I didn't fall for that one, but I wasn't there to agree or disagree, only to see Little Richard preach. I felt like he made a little over-much of it. I saw a man with a pendulum swing inside that went from one extreme to the other and back again. He was sincere in what he was saying. A few years later, I was at somebody's house and Oprah or something like that was on, Little Richard the guest. He was complaining about not getting enough royalties for his songs, having been ripped off in the original contract. He was talking about being the king of rock n roll. His face was stretched so tight from face-lifts I was thinking you could play drums on his face. I don't care that he lobotomized himself with cocaine, bounces back and forth between extremes in his private life, and comes across on tv like he's nuts. The first concert video I watched a few minutes ago was in b&w. He totally gets into the music. He was singing, standing at the piano pounding it with both hands, facing the audience, bouncing up and down, his face behind the mic, hopping up and down. I thought this a marvelous demonstration of multi-tasking; bobbing up and down, pounding a piano with both hands, standing up, singing into a mic, attention on an audience of several thousand. I felt a mild awe at his performance. I saw Prince in one of his amazing performances. It was rock n roll in the raw. I saw Billy Idol with his band Generation X. I saw punk rock, the match that started the fire. I saw Joe Strummer of the Clash, Richard Hell, Perry Ferrell. I saw that Little Richard sounds as good today as he did then. 

little richard

Rock n roll has moved on in new directions since the 1950s, though it has not moved beyond Little Richard. It's like he's the North Star of rock. I was thinking, while he was singing Jenny Jenny, I'd like to hear a punk band cover it, a band like NOFX. Johnny Winter came to mind singing, I was raised on rock. Rock n roll started when I was 13, just ready for some music of my own. I went on YouTube to a concert called Little Richard and Friends--Legends in Concert. I think this might have been 1968, a big concert in London. It started with Little Richard playing several songs, then Bill Haley and the Comets played Rock Around The Clock, Jerry Lee Lewis playing Hound Dog and Whole Lotta Shakin Goin On, and an extended Chuck Berry concert. Soon after it started, I saw it was forty-one minutes, thinking I'd listen to one or two Little Richard songs and go on. Little Richard kept me listening, then Jerry Lee kept me watching, then Bill Haley totally held my attention, more Little Richard, and then Chuck Berry sang several songs. These were the people who pulled me into rock n roll in my early teens. I watched all of it. I remember when  Bob Dylan took up rock n roll and it became rock. The English sound happened and the rock n roll that went before suddenly became oldies. Now, oldies is 80s and 90s rock. Sixties rock lives in today's heavy metal. Punk continues. Punk started approximately 1975 and has been going ever since. The first twenty-five years, punk was only played on college stations. Commercial stations were afraid of it. Then it became "mainstream," commercial radio. 

From the moment I heard Patti Smith's first album, I was wanting to hear more. New Wave was the New York style of punk, and Punk in London was sending records over here. I listened to both. The English punk took hold of me in a don't-let-go kind of way. From all the kinds of music I have in the house to listen to, I tend to go to late 70s English punk when I want to rock. Joy Division, Siouxsie and the Banshees, the Clash, Generation X, and out of Berlin, Nina Hagen, the Mother of Punk. Nina Hagen's bands on every album did it right. Punk started just as I was leaving the city for the mountains. Upon arriving in the mountains, I found the NPR FM station WFDD in Winston-Salem. From ten til midnight a college student dj, Didi Thornton, called herself DDT, played fresh new punk every night and I taped several of her shows. They put her off the air after a year or so. The people who contributed money to the station revolted against her. It was the same as adults shutting down the Fifties period of rock n roll, calling it communist, subversive, African therefore devil worshiping. It was the black influence in the music that drove the white grownups nuts. The other claims were smokescreens around the central issue: white kids were listening to nigger music. Dick Clark did his best to deflect interest to Italian pretty boys and doo-wop groups, and there came a time rock n roll was fading to the background. Then the English sound happened, the Dave Clark Five, Spencer Davis Group, Rolling Stones, and it's been on full blast ever since. Going into the last days before Thanksgiving, I have to say that I am grateful for rock n roll.   

little richard grown up

  

GRUMPY OLD BASTARD ROAD RUNNER

 

jack's nose

Calm, quiet day after a night of big thunder and rain. I went out with a couple of five gallon buckets to shovel up some donkey droppings to spread under the rhododendron around the house. They are huge, ready for some nourishment. I don't know how well it works, but I spread it on the ground out around the outside edge of the branches where the root tips crawl through the ground. I've been told donkey is high potency manure that burns the plants. I'm assuming leaving it on top of the ground and letting the nutrients soak in a little at a time during rains will be more gentle. I'm not tilling it into the ground. The pink rhododendron that get full sun are blooming now while the ones in the shade are just now popping the buds. In my early years in the mountains the pink rhododendron, the ones the people in the old way called purple, bloomed in late June every year. The  blooming has crept forward in time until they're blooming mid May now. I've watched their blooming season advance closer to the end of winter. These rhododendron have almost rounded tips on their leaves. They love sunlight. The other rhododendron has pointed leaves and white flowers the old people called pink. They also called rhododendron laurel and called mountain laurel ivy. It was a language overlap in changing times the old folks couldn't adjust to. Laurel was laurel and ivy was ivy. Somebody comes along saying that's not laurel and that's not ivy, the old folks would let it go by, somebody else trying to make something common into something high sounding. One of the many insights picked up in these mountains was seeing that the people of the old way before electricity and oil were not less intelligent than us because they didn't finish high school and their grammar was different. We from outside the mountains tend to look at the old hillbillies as none to brite, people who were poor because they were uneducated. I see it so the other way around now, I have to watch judging people who take mountain culture for a lesser version of their own, because I did it for too long a time to admit without embarrassment.

 

jack's topknot

 

When it comes to intelligence, they had it all over us. Their educational system taught them how to figure things out. Ours has us memorizing details. Ever tried to read a high school history text book? Detail after detail to be memorized. So boring you never want to read another book the rest of your life. Bring back the Bible, just because it's good reading. I'm not going to say anything about the twitter generation, because I know nothing at all about them. I see a few in the coffee shop and they act like they're not even there. That's the extent of my experience. Recalling a time recently I went into a local restaurant with friend Bill Nixon from Atlanta. I came face to face with the guy who was to seat us, looked to be about 18. I drew a blank. I don't know how to talk to an eighteen year old. So many generation gaps have gone between us I lost track of the young long ago. I'm looking at the guy and he's looking at me and I don't know what to say. Every experience I've had in recent years speaking to somebody that age, they say, What? I didn't want to go through any of it. I put two fingers up. Bill stepped up. He and the guy talked like peers. The kid talked to him like Bill could hear, and Bill was older than me. Bill has taught art in university much of his life. His students are people of that age and he knows how to talk to them. Knows so well, the guy lit up talking with Bill. The difference, Bill saw him person to person, I saw him the other side of a communication barrier. It was all in my attitude. Bill looks like old Walt Whitman and I look like a retired cop. Now, when I have occasion to address the young, I tell myself to receive them for who they are, like everybody else, and talk like the other can hear. In many ways, it's like being in a foreign country among the young in this time of the life. The ones I know, I connect with them easily. It's the ones I don't know that put me in a state of bewilderment. Perhaps I put too much emphasis on not understanding their culture. I admired that moment in Bill. A bit of urban sophistication was in the mix too, none of which I have.

 

jenny's whiskers

 

My friend Meredith I've known since she was a baby. Wasn't around her much, a time or two a year, but feel like I know her. First time I saw her after her PhD, I felt like she was closer and at once farther away. Farther away in that she has impressive knowledge in her head. A time I saw her when she was in high school, she had read on her own for fun, the Iliad and the Odyssey. She was then reading a two inch thick commentary on them. I daresay I was impressed. I might have wiggled my way through maybe one of them, but never the commentary at that age. She now has a baby as cute as she was. Her parents never hit her and she will never hit her baby. My friend Pat, who lives in NY state close to Massachusetts, raised two girls without hitting them. Oldest is now a surgeon. The other works with her in her landscaping business. They are brilliant, beautiful women, inside and out, contributions to the world around them. I'm comfortable in my age, comfortable in my culture, comfortable in my world of friends and neighbors. People come in from outside these parameters and I'm lost for what to say or do. I don't understand people outside my world anymore. I've given so much focus of energy to understanding the culture I live in, the people I know and the mountain of memories that go with advancing age, I don't pay attention to anything outside these fields, or meadows. Nobody tells me anymore I need to pay more attention to the world out there (television). Everyone in my world knows I never will. I've not paid attention to tv since 1961. Only have one now for watching films. Films are art forms. Tv is too, but about as much an art form as a child's coloring book. The art in television is mind manipulation. A century and a half of the study of psychology and what is the result? Mind control by way of television, addictive mind control that creates imaginary reality as directed by.... When you don't watch television and live in a world of people that do, just the frame of mind, ways of thinking make me an outsider. I hear Patti Smith again, Outside of society! That's where I wanna be! Followed by Lenny Kaye's guitar strings. Hail Yeah! Rebel yell.  

 

jack's nostril

 

Outside of society is where I'm comfortable. A thought of being comfortable in society gives me the shivers. There was a time in the life when I never imagined it possible to get out from under the constant assault of other people's expectations, like it would be impossible. The day I turned off caring, it became possible. I came to realize nobody has a right to expect of someone else. I quit allowing other people to expect of me. I quit caring before the move to the mountains. I'm in a place, have been here awhile, where I don't perform other people's expectations unless I agree to it or offer to. I found in these hills that the people outside society are the very most interesting people around. I'm remembering what friend Jr Maxwell told me his daddy, who was born months after the end of the War of Yankee Aggression, told him, Stay away from important people. I was inclined in that direction when he said it, but it was nice to have it so succinctly put. When somebody says, I didn't expect that of you, I think without saying it, that's your problem, not mine. I know I've pist an awful lot of people off with indifference to their expectations. It keeps them away. I don't want around me people who expect of others, especially the unspoken expectations, my favorite kind to trample. I have a maxim of my own on the subject, expect me to walk on your eggshells, they will be broken. It's been my attitude a very long time, so long I don't think about it anymore. It's become my nature. If I wanted to be a social butterfly, I would not choose here to do it. I came to Waterfall Road to perform that corny cliché, find myself. Oh, what a difference it made. A particular church here I liked, felt the spirit good there, went a few times, then the expectations start, "We expected to see you last week, brother." I'm gone. Once expectation raises its head and starts talking, I make tracks, high-speed tracks that barely touch the ground.

 

jenny's eye

 

 

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EARTH DAY WITH PEOPLE OF THE EARTH

wrench

Yesterday I searched for my own definition of nature, came to see the natural world as whatever is not created by the human mind, natural meaning left alone by human mind. This does not mean to dismiss the human mind, which, itself is natural as a tree, a rock, a squirrel. The human mind, a microcosm of the Creator is a creator itself. Mind created civilizations all around the globe down through time. Mind created an historical legacy of art from beginning to present. In Athens, Greece, 1972, I went to the museum of Greek art. I saw some of the very first carvings in soft stone of the first human depictions in that part of the world of self representation. They were static, arms straight down for centuries. The Greek renascence, the Classical Age, depicted the human form in motion, in time. Art is one activity of the human mind, philosophy too, that a good case can be made for to include them as the same as the natural world. Plato continues to be as relevant to the human condition as Michelangelo and Matisse. Much of our own human behavior is natural as donkey behavior, or chimpanzee behavior, cat behavior. I believe it is that part of self, the natural world part, that I have aspired to find in adult life. To do it, I've had to separate myself from the games of the human mind like social climbing, making money as an end in itself, identifying with the most expensive house, car and clothes affordable, and the right people. That's the zone I consider unnatural; therefore, the world. The mind likes to attach itself to things as expressions of self. Of course mind is attached to things because things are creations of the mind. A rubber ducky, somebody's mind created it. God creates life, the whole cycle from birth to death, whereas creations of the human mind begin their process of entropy upon creation. I hesitate to use the word God, because its meaning varies from individual to individual, but it's the same with a lot of words.

ross

My way of living the natural world in human society is to have my right people be the people I naturally resonate with in varying degrees. Several years ago I decided to trim my associations down to the people I care about who care about me. I have enough people in my life I care about who care about me that I don't have room for gamers. When somebody starts gaming me, it's a very short time before it's a game of one, bouncing a ball off a wall. I quit playing bridge not long after catching on and finding it a fascinating game I believed I could learn well enough in a few years to become a player. But the temperaments of bridge players was something I couldn't handle. When I got cussed by my partner for playing the wrong card, I stood up, announced I will never play another game of bridge the rest of my life and left the table. How are we going to finish the game? I don't know, that's yours to figure out. My hillbilly blood shining through, back when I didn't know I had hillbilly blood, and sure as hell wouldn't have told anybody if I knew it. Blood is natural. I believe it is natural when somebody gets in my face cussing me to do something about it right now, whatever it takes, least violent recourse first, unless it calls for putting the individual on the ground. You don't have to be a fighter to be able to do that real easy. Just turn on the mode Justin calls survival mode when he's in a fight, when you do whatever it takes. Our feelings are natural as our bones. I'm recalling my friend Jr Maxwell in his 80s telling me, You have to go with your feelings. Another time he said, Patience is everything. He was a welder, a tractor mechanic, a sawmiller, heavy-equipment operator, farmer, bluegrass banjo picker and singer, husband in grief without his wife, a man of the real thing wisdom, who looking back over his life assessed himself a fool. I called him, in my mind, the wise fool. He used mind for a tool, for figuring out how to fix things. Money was what you needed to meet expenses, the rest of it was living your life, enjoying talking with friends around the wood stove in the tractor shop, enjoying playing bluegrass on weekends wherever the band played.

 

zak

 

Had to make a town run today for cat litter and gas for the car. Stopped at the Exxon station for four gallons, 80 miles. Walking from the pump to the station to pay, I saw Doris putting gas in a car for a woman I didn't know. I spoke to Doris, the woman started to drive off. Doris started drumming the trunklid with the palm of her hand and hollering for the woman to stop. She stopped. She was up in years. Inside, paying Doris, I said, That's me in a year or two. She said, I'm afraid I'm gonna be there too. It was an amusing moment, but it was not funny--if we live long enough, we will each have such lapses. It was a moment of empathy both Doris and I were feeling. I'm glad we spoke of it. I was thinking this is what I love about country people. Doris knew the woman and knew she could not put gas in her car, went out to work the pump herself. I just now heard the yipping of a pack of coyotes in the donkey meadow. I jumped and went out the door hollering GIT, loud like the giant that can kill you by looking at you. I had to holler several times. Each time I hollered, one or two stopped, until after half a dozen or more monster roars they quit. One stayed behind. It sounded hurt. But their yipping sounds like they're screaming in pain anyway. It continued to squeal for quite awhile after all the others were quiet. I hope Jenny nailed one. If she did, word will have run through the pack by now that donkeys fight back. I don't know how Jenny responds to coyotes, but I do know they scare her and Jack. It tickled me to show Jenny and Jack my psychic power over the coyotes. When the ice cream man brays, the coyotes scatter. After attempting to frighten coyotes by clanging shovels together or clanging pots and lids, I learned quickly they paid these noises no mind. But holler GIT in a bold monster voice, it gets their attention. They know it's the monster that lives in the barn. I don't mind the donkeys having coyote experience. Donkeys can kill coyotes, but Jack and Jenny don't know it yet. A highway of trails the night animals use runs just the other side of the donkey meadow. The night animals know two donkeys are living here by now.      

 

harry

 

I stopped by the tractor shop, Maxwell Equipment in Whitehead, to breeze with the fellers, smoke cigarettes and talk. It was Jr's shop, which Ross has now. Ross and Jr were friends since Ross was a child like Justin and I have been friends since he was a child. Ross is the natural next one to keep Jr's shop going. Zak went to UNC Chapel Hill in philosophy and makes pottery at home. He has a short-legged black and white dog named Rimbaud. Harry is a retired Army and Air Force jet and helicopter mechanic. Harry gets so much in retirement, he doesn't need any more money, so he hangs at the shop and works all day for something to do. All three of them have fast minds good at taking IQ tests, putting round pegs in round holes. Every job that comes in is something to do the first time. They use their minds figuring out as they go. All three were involved in work today they had to focus close attention to, so I left them to work without distraction and walked around with the camera. They know I stay out of the way. I've known the shop for so many years, it's as comfortable as being at home. I remember sitting in wooden chairs with Jr gazing at the cars and trucks going by outside the big garage door, talking for hours. These are people devoid of pretensions. None of them is going kiss anybody's ass to get ahead. In New Age speak, you might say they're grounded. All three are from here, all three from families that have been here a long time. They're Appalachian Americans, hillbillies, and wouldn't have it any other way. We are each very different people who share a respectful memory of Jr Maxwell and a love for these hills, would rather live poor here than rich someplace else. We are all people who have withdrawn from what we take for a fake society and live our lives the way we want to. Patti Smith sings in my head, Outside of society, that's where I wanna be. These are people I value, people I look up to. I see them natural human beings as opposed to correct or right or best. I call them good people. Some may not. I don't care. I present them as examples of people I am drawn to who live closer to the earth than to the world.

 

found art

 

 

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PAULA DEEN AINT SO BAD

I think of the Eastern European countries that lived under Soviet rule for half a century when I see the step-by-step transition the Reagan Revolution is taking us through to police state, which is here now. It's even out in the open. Our American freedoms are being shut down, systematically, one at a time, by republican legislation and the republican supreme court. I think of Latvia and Estonia, peaceful countries that fell under the Soviet occupation unto cultural depression. I see that cultural depression occurring in USA as police state moves in, dismantling democracy with a popular zeal. Police state is not rule by intelligence. American white men have proven over the last half century that white men are not intelligent rulers. Neither are any other kind of men. It is time for women to come forward. Though when they do, they get shut down by the white man Old Boy Network. Paula Deen is now experiencing the Martha Stewart treatment and the Loraine Helmsley treatment, what happens in America when a woman gets a little too much money (power). It's time to shut her down. Oprah was not a problem. She was black. No admittance to the Old Boy Network no matter how much money she has. Paula Deen's misfortune is being a hyper successful white woman in America.

I've been seeing articles about her use of the word nigger. I've seen an interview with a black man who has known her well for many years. He told about black people who have worked for her for a long time with responsible positions, regarded with respect and friendship. It's like the time Jimmy the Greek used the enword and was put off the air almost immediately. They wanted rid of him. He had a little bit too much of a working class air about him. He wasn't bland enough. A few days ago I saw a clip from a Bill Maher show where a woman Maher identified as Southern, evidently a liberal journalist, made the remark that anyone who is a racist is evil. I've been seeing/hearing this over and over. Paula Deen said nigger; therefore, she's evil. I have a feeling calling somebody evil for use of a word that has fallen out of media favor is an act, itself, of evil. This woman so proud of identifying herself liberal made me question liberal. The first quarter century of the Reagan Revolution made liberal a word that made liberals shy of owning up to. Then it became a word to be proud of, a reaction. Now that it's an identity to be proud of, the ridiculous surfaces.

If having even the remotest racist thought is evil, then everybody on earth is evil. Back to the Christian square one; we're born in sin, born bad to be made good by beatings and beratings. The Reagan Revolution is about racism. Taking money away from "programs" and benefits to help black people survive in the most racist nation on earth is the character of the Reagan model the republicans of today parrot. He and the Reagan white house staff called MLK, Martin Lucifer Coon. The Supremes have now identified themselves as the Roberts KKKourt racists, which we already knew. We have an evil supreme court. Duh. Don't think any of our white congressmen or senators or their staffs give a shit about African Americans. They represent the racist rich. They pretend for the show, looks bad, and when it comes to legislation, they're racists. The republican party became the racist party in 1954, when the democrat party turned from exclusion to inclusion. The democrat racists of the South turned into republicans overnight. Before, democrat was the racist party. Now that the South is solid republican, it does not mean all Southerners are racist. Most of the people I know are not. Many I know are. One of my racist friends at age 30 is still friends with his black friends he knew all the way through school. He has another black friend he knew as his dad's friend growing up. And I'm not talking step-n-fetch-it friends. I mean equal others. Yet, as a good ol' Southern boy, he don't like niggers. I don't even try to figure it out.

My friend Swami Yogeshananda, who is in his 90s now, living in a Hindu monastery in the southern California mountains, said years ago in conversation that Southerners like the individual, not the race. He said in the North they like the race, not the individual. Whether or not that is a flawless rule of thumb isn't why I'm bringing it up. What I'm getting at is my racist friend, Southern Appalachian bred-and-buttered, likes the individuals he knows, but not the race, an idea. Racism is totally an idea. Race, itself, is totally a learned idea. Of course, how it acts out is another thing. My friend Carole told me of the time she offered a book she'd just finished, a biography of Sidney Poitier, to an elderly woman friend who couldn't even touch the book when she saw the black face on the cover. Didn't want to hear about it, nothing. Carole is every bit as Southern as her friend and has no racism in her. It had never entered her mind the other woman could be so locked down. Many are. Racism is not strictly a white issue. There was a time I worked for a year with a black woman from Baltimore. The racism in her was off-putting for the racism itself, not that I cared she looked down on me for being a cracker. The white people look down on me, too, for not having money, position or status, and especially for being that way by will.

The Paula Deen case brings to mind Patti Smith. If she had a tv show, was making lots and lots of money with a network contract, and somebody pointed out that back in the late 70s she recorded a song that she wrote, Rock n Roll Nigger. "Baby, baby, baby, I'm a rock n roll nigger! Outside of society---that's where I wanna be! Nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger, nigger!" She'd be off the air and a scandal from hell. The queen of punk said the enword! OMG. But then, there's the saving grace of punk: punk doesn't give a shit. Same with rap. The comedy of this time in history is that the enword is even more unacceptable in the white middle class than fuck, what used to be the efword. And I'm talking about the South. You can say fuck all you want, except in church and coffee shops. In the working class, the enword and the efword are used at will, primarily in reaction to the middle class, the management class, the bosses, enforcers of political correctness, including not smoking. They're as bad as preachers' wives in the old ways. The ruling class uses the enword freely. They're racists and don't give a shit who knows it.  Hence: the republican party is systematically dismantling democracy in a time when people of color in the electorate now outnumber white. Our entire American way of life is being shut down by white racism, and we can't say the enword. LMAO.

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PATTI SMITH AND NINA HAGEN ROCK

     photograph by robert mapelthorpe

Having myself a rock concert at home. I've not sat and listened to any rock albums in several years. I tend now to want to hear Kyle Creed play banjo and Willard Gayheart sing, Alternate Roots, bluegrass, old-time, mountain music. Turning inward to home, focusing on the music as it is made in the immediate world I live in, the culture of this spot on earth. It pulled my interest away from rock, as I knew it would. My first discovery of old-time in 1977 was so dynamic, I knew if I started paying close attention, I'd lose interest in rock. Punk had just begun in 75 and it was gradually trickling out into the world at college radio stations, and that's it, for about 25 years. Sixties rock (classic rock) was not played on the radio stations. Sponsors wouldn't have it. The radio played Motown and disco in the time. Off the radio, Jefferson Airplane, Big Brother & Holding Co, the Velvet Underground, Cream; none of them would ever be heard anywhere around where I lived. In mid 70s came a big sound of the next generation, like Ted Nugent, Bon Jovi, REO Speedwagon. They were big on the charts, but I'd already been there, done that. These bands made Sixties rock into pop.


Punk happened in 1975 and, again, no radio stations played it but college stations. Punk became a culture different from the pop mainstream, which was just starting to get used to the Sixties sound of the slower rhythms that can't be danced to (except hippie dance), sit-down music; then punk happened with high-speed rhythms like old-time fiddle tunes. It's stand up and jump up and down in place music. For the next quarter century I was listening to bands nobody around me had heard of, like Generation X (Billy Idol's London band), Siouxsie and the Banshees, Nina Hagen, Joy Division, Patti Smith, the Clash, the Damned, et al. Earlier this evening, while writing the first paragraph, I was hearing ARTIST IN THE AMBULANCE by Thrice. Had to crank it way up. Finally in the later years of my life I have the ideal sound system I've waited all my life for. It cranks way up and delivers satisfaction. Caterpillar went out the door. Now it's Patti Smith's RADIO ETHIOPIA that was new when I went to my first fiddler's convention. In Patti Smith I heard an artist making rock the art way. This album did very poorly for the band. Critics didn't get it and it was such step off the edge of pop culture into art that it left its audience. It probably defined for the band the line between what works and what doesn't work with the people who became fans by HORSES. A demanding audience. How do you follow one of the great albums in rock? And it your first?

     patti smith group

Lenny Kaye's guitar is one of the great ones in rock, too. Plays a Fender Stratocaster. He may not be a big name in the pop world, but I'd guess in the rock music world he's very well respected. PSG, Patti Smith Group, continues in my ear to be among the very finest bands in rock where musicianship and and plain all out rock and roll is concerned, done in a new, artful manner. I'd say they could raise an audience into ecstasy. I've not had the opportunity to get to a concert, because that meant going to New York and one thing and another, several hundred dollars out of pocket per day, 12 hours each way. Not me. I don't drive to NY to hear some poet, say Molly Peacock, read at some intellectual hangout. Alas, all the art in New York has to go unseen by me. Photographs have to do. And that's ok. I can't see Patti Smith in concert. But I can see Burning Spear in concert at Ziggy's. That's worth a lot. Winston-Salem and Charlotte have a lot of rock venues. I can see anybody I want. But it's not that important. I'm happy hearing Patti fill my head with vibrations I like to hear in the familiarity of home.


Radio Ethiopia is going now, ten minutes of Lenny Kaye's guitar, JD Daugherty's drums, Patti's voice working with Kaye's guitar. It's been a very long time since I've heard Radio Ethiopia. It is still as great as I heard it in 1976. This screeching of guitar strings, doing it something like Velvet Underground could have done it, is what ran off their sales. Velvet Underground was an art band, not a pop band. So was PSG. When I heard it, I didn't know anything about critics and sales. All I knew was Patti Smith had a new album and I needed to hear it fast as I could get my hands on one. I felt like the entire album was an excellent next thing after HORSES; they'd followed their artist ears and reached out into fusion of poetry and sound. It helps to be one who appreciates poetry itself and can find it in unexpected places, like punk rock. Rock is the popular poetry of our time, and I have to say, there are some truly superb poets in rock. I'm looking at a Nobel Prize for Bob Dylan if he doesn't die too soon. He may not. Possibly when he puts out his apex album. The last four of Dylan's albums I can't help but think of as the best Dylan I've heard all along the way. And I've heard him from Man of Constant Sorrow on his first album with just an acoustic guitar. Every one of his albums is as much a work of art as a book of poems by Wallace Stevens.

Patti Smith has the name of the first punk rocker, the definer of punk, whatever. Nina Hagen is called the Mother of Punk. She says in one of her songs, "I'm the mother of punk! So what the funk!" Nina Hagen was another one who was out there on the edge making art rock. Punk is not one sound. Punk is your own sound. Punk is the music you want to make. We tend to think of the Sex Pistols and the Clash as the definition of punk, but it's not like that. I've put on Nina Hagen's second album UNBEHAGEN (translates: restless). She's playing African Reggae, a great reggae song, anyway in my way of hearing. It's not Black Uhuru, for sure, but it works. It's punk. Nina Hagen is somebody you either get it or you don't. Like the Tao te Ching in that way, though different. Nina Hagen cannot be explained. Her albums always have artist musicians, mostly German, They never hesitate to rock. Caterpillar came in for a morsel of catfood between albums. When Nina started, out the door Caterpillar went. She's not used to this kind of thing happening here. TarBaby loved it. I could play Rocket From The Crypt really loud and TarBaby would be lying in front of a speaker happy and comfortable.


Nina is singing in German on her first albums. I don't mind not understanding the words. I've never paid a lot of attention to the words. Most rock is sung such that I can't make out words. Like THRICE. Also THE USED. I don't understand any words from the Thrice album. Didn't understand any words at the concert. The twenty-somethings around me were singing words like those were words the vocalist was screaming. Oh well. I read words to a song I don't understand, if they're included in liner notes, and am satisfied not understanding them. I've found pop lyrics largely boring. Then you get people like Patti Smith, Bob Dylan, Mick Jagger, Siouxsie Sioux, Lou Reed and a very long list of others, who write lyrics that equal contemporary poetry. I'm not one who thinks of rock a "lower art form." Rock is where theater and poetry have disappeared into. The rock concert is contemporary theater. You say there's no story. We don't need a story now. We do anecdotes now. Quips. We don't live stories anymore. I tend to think of this album I'm listening to now by Nina Hagen the same as reading a dozen poems in a book of poetry by somebody like Philip Larkin, Ron Padgett, Elizabeth Bishop. The guitar at this moment on Hermann Heiss Er, is great as a rock solo gets.

     nina hagen band

I've needed this. It's like a cleansing of the spirit. This is music I love intensely and have loved for the second half of my life. Have not given it much attention over the last dozen or so years. Maybe this is return of long-term memory coming back. Like first time I heard Patti Smith's HORSES. It was one of the greatest moments of my life. Not long later I'm hearing Nina Hagen's Superboy and TV Glotzer, delighted to hear somebody tearing it up in rock again, this time in a new way. Nina Hagen Band is there with Patti Smith Group in the realm of great rock and roll bands that applied the cutting edge. This album Unbehagen is as current as Five Finger Death Punch, minus the rap influence. It was from 77 or 78. I've never had a chance to see Nina perform live, though would have loved it. Ultimately, it doesn't matter. It's just another experience with the music. They're finishing up the album with No Way, an instrumental of how punk rock is played by musicians who don't let up. I've never had the chance to see The Who, another band I'd have loved to experience from the audience. They were said to play at the loudest decibel level of any band. I heard the Cars and wondered if the Who could actually be louder than them. Who knows? Who cares?


Caterpillar came back in.


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CONFORMITY COP IS BACK

     william wegman

I just now got called on FB by an adult for saying shit. Lord Have Mercy!!! I'm expected to be on tv everywhere I go, and now I'm expected to be on tv at home. The "adult" who made a point of noting it disappoints me. When I was a kid, I was trained to believe by adults that adults are conscious and know what they're doing. I grew up into the adult world and found that belief system as big a fantasy as Santa Claus. It is just adults keeping kids in the dark so they won't see that the adults in their worlds don't have a clue about anything, not even tv. Since I entered the adult world, I've spent most of my time avoiding it. I go out into the world and I'm expected to act like I'm on tv.


Well, I don't do what is expected of me the same as I don't do s'posed-to. I'll do expected if there has been an agreement that includes my thoughts on the matter. Like if I've agreed to meet somebody at a certain place, certain time, that's an expectation I honor. When I'm expected not to speak as myself in the town where I learned the importance of being myself in all occasions, I question present company. I say shit. I'm in a place with a dozen adults around, mostly hair graying to white, I say shit and it's like I'd broke into a daycare center and shouted shit until the police came and arrested me. I have seen the world change immensely. The change I find most retarded, most conformist, most unconscious is political correctness.


In 2012 a middle class white adult male cringes at the sound of the word shit. In 2012 a white adult naked male in Miami ate the face off another white adult naked male in the bicycle lane in the turn to Miami Beach to the east and Liberty City to the west. The guy that found them says he's moving, getting out of that area, can't stand to live in there any more. On the news in 2012 somebody white male opened fire on a random bunch of people. I remember after WW2 it was said the Japanese had no regard for human life. It was said of the Germans too. It looks even worse for us all over the world now. What do Americans do? They kill every kid in a first grade classroom, then kill themselves. No other country in the world has such news. Surely such has happened somewhere else in the world, but people in the rest of the world don't think like Americans. Americans threw away thinking in practical terms many years ago. Anti-intelligence has been the American way from the beginning, but it has grown by now to the point nobody intends to learn anything unless there is money or the promise of money in it. A few centuries of evolving anti-intelligence and we have political correctness taken seriously by educated adults. Incredible.


This is why I stay home much of the time. When educated adults play that silly shit on me, I act out nothing at all like what I'm feeling. I lose respect at the snap of a finger. I cannot respect anyone who corrects me for errors in political correctness. I don't need to tell them anything or argue about it or talk about it. I don't need to do anything. When I lose respect, it's gone. It never comes back. There's nothing to say. Of course, my respect is the same as nothing to the other. But it means something to me. When somebody alienates me with political correctness for political correctness sake, I cannot ever take that person seriously again. And I dislike it when that happens. Invariably it's somebody I thought well of or wanted to. In church we talk church correctness. Outside church the white middle class talks political correctness, which is actually television correctness. When somebody gets in my face about political correctness I realize this person holds television as his/her authority.


I'm not going to get in the way of that. Go right ahead. Leave me out of it. If I'd said feces it would have been humorous, Heh-heh TJ yer so funny. Had I said merde, I'd have been thought cultivated and intelligent knowing French slang. Tra la. I've never seen anything to match PC as a reading of the degree of American middle class unconsciousness. Post WW2 has seen a steady decline in American consciousness to the point we've all lost our democracy while the educated worry about words all children know by the time they're 3. Now that political correctness has put nigger out of the white middle class vocabulary, shit must be the next targeted word. I feel like putting on Patti Smith's punk anthem Rock n Roll Nigger, Outside of society, that's where I wanna be. Baby baby baby I'm a rock n roll nigger. Nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger nigger. I'd like to hack that song into a satellite coffee house radio channel.


Rock is truly rebel music. Patti Smith did her part. Thanks Patti. Pissin in the river, watchin it rise. Rock has been a good pop music for the young to keep a kind of balance the best they can in a world where officially nothing is rational, where you have to adopt official lies as truth and live by them without questioning. Remember to always talk like you're on tv. Won't it be an ideal world when all the girls look like Britney Spears and all the boys like Justin Timberlake. And we'll all talk like the voice in a GPS gadget. Every girl a Barbie, every boy a GI Joe. Ken is Barbie's gay brother, who is sad because he can't get married in North Carolina. His boyfriend's name is Ken, too. They look just alike. We won't need conformity police in this vision of the future, because everyone will be plastic and can't talk and can't move: the ideal. Mickey Mouse rules. The 1% laugh at us, so easy to manipulate.


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