CUBAN NIGHT AT THE SPARTA COFFEE SHOP

      dr & mrs jose arocha

Another Cuban night at Selma's Backwoods Bean Coffee Shop, Main St., Sparta. http://spartacoffeeshop.com/. I think everyone I talked with last night who has been in the county awhile said, "It's hard to believe this is happening in Sparta." By this, the meaning was the openly happy, friendly atmosphere in the place, Cubans and Anglos partying together, getting acquainted, becoming friends. The dance of the night was Dr Arocha and his wife. After much of the evening had gone by, someone called for the Arochas to dance. He was ready and she didn't want to. He talked to her just right and she consented. I'd taken the camera along and had not yet taken any pictures. When they started, I got out the camera. I'd kicked myself since the last Cuban party at Selma's where I failed to get any photos of the dancing Arochas. So this time, those were the only pictures I got. These pictures tell the party fairly well, the Latin flavor of the music in the dancing.

I was remembering the movie title, White Men Can't Jump, looking at the dancers thinking, Anglos can't dance. Except mountain country people, hillbillies. They can dance for sure. The rest of us stand around and shake and move feet as an assist to stay in motion. Cubans were dancing, Anglos standing around with wine glasses in hands, watching in awe. We were all in awe of what the Cubans were doing with dance. A woman in her 80s did some dancing that was dance, not just the motions. Lisa deMilo sang her Broadway hit tunes, again around age 80, in her well-experienced stage presence and Latin attitude. Lisa's husband, Johnny Violin, played some tunes on his violin. This man commanded an orchestra of violins in Miami for much of his adult life. Both he and Lisa have a lifetime of stage experience. She has a stage presence that I found remarkable. When she had something to say and wanted everyone to listen, like an announcement or introducing a song, she immediately got everyone's attention and all went silent. I was thinking, if I'd tried that, they'd have talked all the louder.

My neighbor, Allan, danced with Selma and I had to laugh. He grew up on disco, and seeing him attempt to incorporate Selma's moves and make them work as dance was amusing to say the very least. I say I had to laugh, because he was brave enough to look awkward in front of everybody, and the transition from disco to Cuban dancing was simply comic. I was also thinking, of all the people here who would like to learn to dance Cuban style, Allan would be the first and in the end the best. Because he's brave enough to jump in, plus, he loves dance. He could even learn to do the dancing with the Latin braggadocio that looks like the castanets are popping and the heels clicking. I couldn't help but think about our cultures, Anglo and Latin, both new world cultures. Anglos came from English culture transported across the ocean and changed until it can be called American culture. The Cubans came from Spanish culture around the same time, transported across the ocean and changed to become Cuban culture. Spain is their mother culture like England is ours. 

Perhaps the saving grace of the coffee shop is that Selma is Cuban. It keeps the "right" people away. The right people who position themselves according to race and assets, whose culture amounts to showing money in their things. Like Andy Warhol said when people look at his paintings they see money. If it's price is $20,000, that's what they see. So put the money on the wall and look at the money itself. He made several silkscreens of dollar bills in multiples. The people who like to be among people who show money don't come into Selma's a second time, because the atmosphere in the coffee shop has nothing to do with money. People who read books go in there. Artists tend to go there. People who have interests besides money and watching tv are there. A conversation with someone in Selma's place is most often about something, talking about a subject. It may be nothing big deal, but usually not about what somebody else is driving or wearing, unless it stands out, like the guy at the party last night dressed as Tarzan. He was a good Tarzan too. 

In about as many ways as it can be thought about, it still seems odd to have so many Cubans in the county. They don't just live at Little Cuba in Piney Creek. They're all over the county. We have three Cuban doctors. The administrator at the hospital is Cuban. At Selma's is where the people go who are ok with that vastly overused word, diversity. Initally, diversity was what American individualism was about, but it got lost in the conformity that went with the abundance of machines, making everything exactly alike, like some people think we're supposed to be, products. I used to think that way, probably still have some loose ends of it mixed in with all the other, because I was trained that way by school, church, tv and home. By this time in the life, after half my life in the mountains where individualism continues, I've allowed myself to be who I am, even when it's not acceptable. I won't say I go so far as to be objectionable, because I'm not about being objectionable either.

I don't know if it's just the people I see, the people karmically connected loosely, or if it's a legitimate pie slice, but I've found that just about everybody wants to be nice, liked, friendly, useful, good. The people we call bad, maybe 1/100th or less of the prison population, are made that way by experience when they're young. Experience this life or experience in a previous lifetime that went to the soul. People I know who have a name for being bad, I don't find bad at all. One I know who spent 15 years in hard prison, his neighbor across the road says he's the best neighbor she's ever had. All I see is people maybe a little slow in figuring they can do something illegal and get away with it, thereby getting a record: Bad. I despise it that the people I know who have been in prison automatically feel like I look down on them for it, when the fact is, I respect them and look up to them for what they've been through. Our penal system is cruel. Not as cruel as in Myanmar and India, maybe. Comparison does not justify the cruelty. But the American people have to change before the penal system can change. The so-called Christians certainly are not doing them any good. In Texas they cheered Perry, evangelist and presidential wannabe, bragging about killing 200+ prisoners with death sentences, no concern that some of them might have been innocent or the sentences draconian.

This could be a subject of conversation at the bar in the coffee shop. The conversations go according to the individuals involved. Like Dudley and I can go just about anywhere conversationally. He can't handle mountain music in any shape nor form and I don't require him to. I can't handle choral music and he doesn't expect it of me. This is what I've found among the mountain people I've known, that you can talk, be friends or acquaintances or first time talking and you don't have to agree. Mountain people know that we are all individual, unique, one of a kind, the only one ever. Everybody has their own thoughts on a given matter. I don't get it so much that people from Away understand that. They tend to have a neon sign on the forehead flashing: Approval, Approval. You don't get that from mountain people at all. You don't like it that his tshirt says, White Tail Hunter, well FU, look the other way. You gonna kick my ass about it, let's go. The suburban middle-class way is to avoid, bypass, dance around confrontation, speak in terms of political correctness that carry denotation without connotation. Handy words, like penis and vagina that children are allowed to say. The people in Selma's who are from here and from Away tend to be people who appreciate the individuals we all are, even enjoy it like the different colors of personalities that make a work of art. Again, last night I heard it said several times, "It's hard to believe this is happening in Sparta." It happens every day in Sparta.

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CUBAN CELEBRATION AT SELMA'S

johnny violin introduces lisa de milo at the cuban celebration

lisa de milo y piney creek

ruben sings of his love

pablo de vincenzo on accordion, his wife sandra with castanets

selma at home

pablo, sandra and selma

lisa de milo, pablo and the back of dr arocha's head

like a dance moment in Carlos Saura's Carmen

Selma's wine-tasting event this month, the last Friday of the month, was Cuban Celebration night. Cuban finger-food spread out on the table, all of it amazingly delicious, the quality of the cooking a treat to the palate. The wine was good, of course. This time, Latin American wines. Good vibrations throughout the party. much dancing to Latin rhythms. Lisa de Milo who started off the night singing was more wonderful than I imagined her to be. I imagined pretty good, given her history with the big bands of what we think of now as Las Vegas music, Frank Sinatra, his league all over the country, all over the world, with her husband Johnny Violin. She sings a good song in English, New York New York, and some beautiful Latin songs in Spanish. She has a good command of the floor when she's on. I've an idea that along her way she has wowed many an audience.

It was a mild form of excitement to have some Cuban musical energy generating in the crosshairs of downtown Sparta. Good Cuban music flowed out the screen door into the open windows of cars stopped at the red light. It's a sensuous, flowing music everyone can dance to, from old to young. All are the same age dancing to Cuban music. It's not like kids jerking around laughing at the old people who hold hands when they jitterbug. One looks at the other and laughs with derision at them for knowing nothing about fashion. On the dance floor at Selma's, the Cubans were showing the anglo Americans that we who call ourselves white can't dance at all. Everybody Cuban in the place was dancing at one time or another in their own ways. Selma got to flowing with the rhythms when her work was done and she was free to join the party. She is not afraid to dance. She's another wide-open woman, uninhibited with her feminine. Like I said of Ashley a couple days ago, I can say of Selma too, that she'd be a good model for a painting of Goddess. That's the kind of feminine energy I see with her.

By Goddess, I mean a full woman. Her feminine grace is her own. 

I'd known Johnny Violin and Lisa de Milo for some years, mostly on the telephone or a chance meeting in the library. He called me one day asking something about a fiddle shop in Galax, wanting to know how to get there and what it is. We talked for quite awhile. He told me his life as a violin player with orchestras that played for Tony Bennett, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, the whole list of singers of that generation of urban music that was pushed aside by rock n roll in the mid 50s along with bluegrass and everything else. None of those musics that rock n roll eliminated died out completely. It seems like now rock n roll is dying out. It's an inclusive music and by now, after half a century, it is an open field with every kind of music being played on the charts. I can't help but think something new is getting ready to move in to fill the gap when rock n roll has become so thin that a lot of people are losing interest and turning to full-bodied acoustic music. There is an awful lot of good musicianship in rock n roll, and certainly dynamic presence. It seems like the wheel of fashion is turning, bringing something up as rock n roll is fading down. I'm suspecting the musics that rock pushed aside are coming back, like bluegrass, big-band, regional kinds of music, like polkas in Michigan, Bob Wills music in Texas.

With gas prices prohibiting going out to corporate entertainment, as it gets more and more expensive to go to a concert of about anything but local music, I'm thinking a lot of people will return to supporting local music. Maybe. That's one possibility of many. Whatever. The music at Selma's came from the people there. Lisa sang, Ruben sang. The accordion player's name is Pablo de Vincenzo. His name is Italian. His papa was Italian and his mama Venezuelan. He was something spectacular on the accordion. He can make you appreciate the instrument like never before. The woman dancing to his music is his wife, Sandra. She was a beautiful woman and a good dancer. She brought to mind women in Carlos Saura's films. Saura is Spanish. I was tripping on Latin culture, how open like family they are with each other out partying, when they see each other. Anglo culture doesn't permit touching except for sex, and dancing is something anglo Americans used to do. When auditorium rock came along, anglo culture quit dancing and sat down at concerts. When anglo's do dance, there's no dance to it, jumping up and down in place for the kids, uncertain, awkward footsteps for the adults. Watching Dr Joe Arocha and his wife dancing was some smooth Latin dancing you'd see on a dance floor at a Cuban dance club.

I was an old stump sitting on a chair or stool the whole time, taking pictures. The other anglo guys avoided the dance area like I did. I'm a boring old white turd. We call ourselves white, but we're really pink. Or is that too much like a pig? As it's been all my life, the fun I have at things like this or anything else is my own enjoyment inside myself. I've always been one to have my fun alone, like going to a movie or a concert. I despise going to a movie with somebody who gripes about it when it's over. Or gripes about whatever's not right about a concert, like, 'I wish everybody didn't stand up all the time! I couldn't see anything sitting down!' That particular concert, Golden Earring, 1976, Charleston, SC, was a great concert from the beginning that put everybody on their feet, and the band kept everybody on their feet throughout the concert, except, of course, for my date, who wanted to sit down. Go ahead and sit down. On my right a 14 year old girl was screaming her guts out, jumping up and down all the time. I said to myself, 'I'm with her.' This is what I mean by boring anglo (white) folks of the English heritage that inhibits sensuous movement. It has inhibited us til we don't dance anymore, as a rule. The Cuban dancers flowed freely with the music, the movements of sensuous Latin dance. Compared to anglo stick-figure dancing, the Cuban dancers flowed like rapidly changing clouds.  

Cuba libre seemed to me the atmosphere of the evening. I was seeing in the Cuban people their allegiance to Cuba before and after Castro. I might have got my first understanding tonight of how the Cuban exiles think of Cuba as it is now. I think if I were to leave my country to be an ex-pat in some place like Finland after the Republican Party overthrew our government with the help of the Supreme Court and set up the police state, I'd feel similar bitterness toward the police state that has run the American Constitution through the shredder and put a complete end to American liberties. We'll have the right to watch television, though what we watch will be monitored. I can't help but think the Democracy experiment in America only lasted 2 centuries. The cancer of self-destruction started growing inside and by now is on the verge of imploding the government by methodical intent from the inside. It's especially fervent now with a get-the-nigger zeal. These were my thoughts spending the evening among Cubans who have been here so long they're now as American as any anglo present. Good vibration, good energy in the people throughout the whole party. Nobody got mad. Nobody started a fight. Nobody cussed anybody out. The place flowed with Selma energy from opening to closing. 

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WINE TASTING WITH SELMA

selma

Wine tasting at Selma's tonight. Thirty people turned up, most of them the regulars, plus a half dozen Cubans who are friends of Selma. They appeared not to be rich Cubans, meaning they didn't have arrogance radiating from them like cheap perfume.I see people I know and people I don't know. My time was spent on a stool at the bar out of the way of the comings and goings and excuse-mes on the floor where everybody stood around with a plate of snacks in one hand, a fork in the other, talking with mouths full like we tell kids not to do. It was a happy crowd of friendly people.

Talked with an old boy my age, Moxley, retired social studies teacher from Ohio, returned to the mountains of his childhood. A Limbaugh Republican was there talking cliches about liberals. Moxley and I talked some examining what is a Conservative and what is a Liberal. We concluded Liberals tend to be people who care about others, and Conservatives tend to be people who don't want to pay school taxes when they don't have a kid in school. Recently I've been seeing interesting changes in political beliefs around me. People are talking back to right wing maniacs when they go spouting off their Limbaugh garbage. For several years, they dominated wherever they were. During the Bush administration, people were afraid of them. The true neo-Nazis. Skinheads are the thug element. I'm glad to see there has at least been enough social change in thinking that somebody talking Limbaugh is no longer tolerated, and often called on it. 

Now that NPR has been forced to tell more Republican news and have more Republicans interviewed, it's becoming silly to listen to All Things Considered. This morning Diane Rhem called a Republican on talking Limbaugh, telling him, in effect, that Rush Limbaugh is not information. Hearing more Republicans being interviewed on ATC now, the level of intelligence has dropped considerably. The dumbing down of National Public Radio has brought it down to almost corporate broadcasting news level. It doesn't have far to go. The Republicans have had a bead on NPR since Reagan launched the first assault to put it out of business 30 years ago. It's limping along now, only because they've compromised their integrity away to stay on the air.

Yesterday at lunch with Jim Winfield, we took to talking about male (testosterone) posturing, how when you start thinking about it, you see all men do it. Look at chickens in the yard. The rooster postures every minute. The hens don't posture, they just peck other hens in their strict pecking order. Male dogs posture, walk with a sense of style like they have chrome points on the toes of their cowboy boots. Macho man. GI Joe. In a dream this morning half asleep, half awake, I saw a rooster with red back feathers, profuse dark green neck and tail feathers and wings. For a brief second I saw him falling head downward, green feathers all in motion attempting to catch the air and not getting it done. It was a second of fluttering rooster feathers in freefall. The rooster had lost his posturing. He was out of control. Even though I don't see myself as one who postures, I do. It's a testosterone thang. 

Jim is serious about his spiritual path, as I am about my own. He and I have very different paths. In both our ways, transcending the ego is the ultimate goal. He's still in his time of believing he can overcome ego by clamping down on it. I don't like to say, been there--done that, so I don't, but in my experience, that thinking is in the past and advanced me nowhere. I've finally come to a relaxed place about it. I can't transcend my ego of my own doing. Pretending I don't have ego doesn't help either. Worrying about ego just makes it worse.

I've come to a place where I don't think about it anymore. Sure, everything I do is ego. Everything I think or say is ego. Even not doing is ego. I've learned to live with it, befriend it. Instead of trying to champion it, I allow it to be. Like I do with my pets. I allow them to be who they are. This way we live together in peace. I don't have ego revolting, insisting on attention at awkward times, generally being difficult. I'm most comfortable just letting it be, like I let Caterpillar go in and out of the house at will. My ego is gentle largely, doesn't intend to hurt others---sometimes it may, though without intent. I'm not afraid to eat crow anymore. Tastes like chicken.

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WINE TASTING RAMBLE

 the party

selma and rafael

Friday night I skipped the Front Porch show to go to Selma's last Friday of the month wine tasting. Missed Jimmy Zeh's banjo and humor, but I've seen him a few times and recorded him a good bit. As I want to go to the Front Porch every Friday night, sometimes I feel like going to something else that happens on a Friday night. It's a loyalty to Selma and the regulars at her coffee shop that drew me to the wine tasting, because so many people kept reminding me. It's as much a matter of support from my side, and from the other side a good time with friends. I believe in supporting my friends in whatever they do, within reason, and all my friends are people I could call rational at least to some degree.

I don't ask for too much rational. Don't want too much rational for myself. It's good, it has an important place, but the irrational has a place too. I like to allow for the irrational in myself and others. It sure helps my understanding of history to accept the irrational as perhaps even more powerful than the rational. Whatever, I like to leave room for both in my world, in my life. Maybe it helps me to justify major irrational decisions in earlier life, to allow irrational its due. Rational is boring, ultimately. Few surprises there. I like the occasional surprise. Not necessarily the surprise that says the car needs a new fuel pump. But those wonderful moments that come out of the blue with no scientific explanation, meaning in the rational mind it didn't happen, but I'd have missed them if I restricted myself to only that which makes sense.

Spiritual experiences since I discovered that God indeed Is and opened to origin, the source of all being and non-being, opened to a universal consciousness that goes way beyond blowing my mind, that baffles me so much it makes me stop thinking about it, which turns out to be the only way to receive it.

The saying comes to mind, "You get what you want after you stop wanting it." I've seen that happen so much in myself and others I know that by now I'm used to it. Somebody talking about an experience might say, Isn't that weird? And I keep my thought to myself, No. Usually, I'll shrug my shoulders, liking to stay out of such conversations, because there's nothing that can be said. It's beyond words, beyond comprehension.

A few nights ago, I watched Peter Greenaway's film, NIGHTWATCHING, a story of Rembrandt, a contemporary of Johnny Appleseed. At the end of the film in special features, I found some interviews with Greenaway about the film. The final thing he had to say was Rembrandt had come to see human existence a matter of sex and death, everything comes down to that. I turn off the movie, eject the disk, go to the computer, turn it on, go to email, something from Edwin Lacy. He wrote, "By the way, you know everything is just sex and death don't you? Everything." The time it took to eject the disk and get the computer going was the span of time between the two. What can I say? What can I do? Nothing. How do I attempt to interpret it? All I can see is it was necessary at that moment for me to get it. Why? I'm not even going to ask. 

It was beyond coincidence. To be able to receive it, I must let go of rational mind and allow just whatever comes along. I believe with conviction it was something I needed to hear, and then to hear again, stressing it. Like the hand of God came into my space and pointed at it, saying, Pay attention to this. This is how I have found the spirit I can only call God communicates with me. Before I caught on, I missed several, one very crucial one I regret my entire life, but since catching on, it's like communicating with Caterpillar now that we're learning each other's body language, eye language, the forms of communication without spoken language. Communication with the spirit doesn't have eye language or body language. It's subtle. I've found the spirit of what I call God gets something across to me by one way or another from sources I'd never anticipate, surprises, out of the blue. Something somehow radiates what might be called a golden glow in the mind's eye, resonance such it gets my attention and says, Pay attention to this. It's for you. Now.

These experiences are not good to talk about, because putting them into words makes them appear irrational; therefore, unscientific; hence, invalid, ridiculous. And then the one with the experience begins to doubt the experience, and like Peter walking on the sea with Jesus thought about what he was doing and sank. It's definitely not of the mind. I hear people at the coffee shop talk about such things that are important to a lot of people like whether or not there's something to atheism. I had a period of time in the life I called atheist, but it turned out to be a gestation period where I did a lot of thinking. By the time I realized, again from out of the blue, the spirit of God had indeed put his hand on my shoulder and said, I'm with you. Not in words. The experience was so convincing that to ignore it would have been to turn around and go backwards into the attitude toward life I was needing to transcend, to get beyond or out of, whichever. Ignorance, I'll call it. Not that I'm anything but ignorant now, but not like then. 

I think of the emptiness I felt within during that period of the life when my rational mind wanted to rule. I don't try to convert atheists, because I figure it's a step along their way too, clearing out the old, making way for the new. New bottles for new wine. So it went at the wine tasting, everyone in clusters talking about sex and death, naming neither, in long animated conversations. Everyone knew each other and everyone was comfortable. We're all very different people, different kinds of people, different nationalities, religions, races, interests. Looking at us like circles, we all intersect at least a little bit with each other as circles. It's a lively, in motion atmosphere of a comfortable number of people, all of them friends partying, Selma's earthmama arms embracing everyone. 

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