OLD-TIME HERALD ARTICLE

the crooked road ramblers at albert hash memorial fest 2011



In today's mail was the new issue of Old-Time Herald, a glossy magazine for old-time music all over the country, from Maine to California. It's published in Durham, North Carolina, edited by the very able editor, Sarah Bryan, the layout done by Steve Terrill, an artist of the visual who picks banjo with the Durham old-time band, The Hush Puppies. Steve always makes a beautiful magazine cover. This month the cover is a black and white portrait of a Missouri fiddler, RP Christeson. I've been taking pictures of musicians regularly for the last three years, so my eye automatically notes a portrait of a musician, in this case a fiddler. He's not playing the fiddle, but holding it by the neck vertically with the bow between two fingers. Only the upper half of the fiddle and only half the bow in the frame. RP has his head turned to his right in just enough profile to show the roundness in the face. It is a beautifully conceived photograph. On the left side is the blur of a figure too close for the camera's focus, just the upper arm and hair above. It says inside that the photograph was made by Howard Marshall in 1987. He wrote the article that accompanies the photograph. To Howard Marshall, I say, Congratulations, a wonderfully unique portrait of a fiddler.


And congratulations to Steve Terrill for seeing the art in the photograph. I met Steve one time at the Sparta Fiddler's Convention for a few moments. He was there with his band, the Hushpuppies. Molly, one of the band's two fiddlers was with him when we talked. My friend Jean was living then. When I'm in the presence of musicians I respect as much as I do them, I feel a fullness of respect, because I appreciate their musicianship and the artists they are. It's the artist I think I appreciate in them first. The kind of respect I feel when I see a painting or sculpture by Will Hernandez, new to the county from Key West, who has such an imaginative eye that everything I've seen by him I've beheld in awe for the art in it. Will is truly an artist. Steve Terrill is truly an artist. He has several expressions for his art sensibilities; doing layout for Old-Time Herald www.oldtimeherald.org, which he does beautifully, picking banjo with the Hush Puppies, beautifully, has a label for old-time music by bands, www.old97wrecords.com, designs the album covers and all that goes with it.


Sarah Bryan, the editor, has shown herself to me to be a first class editor, the kind of editor a writer can work with happily. We've become acquainted by email over the last few years, turns out we know quite a lot of people in common, I knew some of the teachers where she went to school growing up in Myrtle Beach. She told me her dad made the big sculptures of dinosaurs, the golden Buddha, all kinds of animals at the miniature golf courses. I have loved those things for a lot of years. Even wondered who made them. They're almost inconceivably outrageous. They are unmistakably Myrtle Beach. Sarah told me that while he was working on a new miniature golf course, he ended up with one creature too many. It was a rhinoceros. He kept it standing in the driveway at home for a year. Sarah said her mother was fine with it. I've wanted to meet them both ever since. If one of my neighbors were to do such a thing, I'd take them a couple bottles of wine to celebrate. The Sarah I've come to know by every-once-in-a-while email correspondence and facebook is sure enough their daughter. Sarah has a spirit of allowing about her. She doesn't seem to me a controller.


Sarah has a manner that is particular to her generation, a young woman with a fast and brilliant mind who followed her interest, worked with NC folklife center and came into the job at Old-Time Herald as editor. Not to say other women have not blazed their own trails. I'm thinking the post-women's liberation generation, the daughters of women's liberation. Girls raised with the convicted belief they can do what they want to do with their lives. Whoever made the decision to hire Sarah into the role of editor made the right decision. I don't have any idea what she's like at the office. I have only the finished product to go by, and every issue the magazine is a beautiful presentation of its content. The ads are even beautiful. She has a banjo picker doing the visual layout with as good an eye as he has an ear. I think Sarah plays fiddle. Together with their staff they make a good band. Looking at the magazine as the music they make putting it together, it works. The magazine is full of reverence for old-time music, though not corny. It's a reverence like the way Dale Jett sings Carter Family songs. It's not sappy. It's a tone of voice in deep respect. That says it pretty good for the magazine, too. It's full of respect, never corny. And it's full of good information.


This issue, v13/#3, has the account I wrote of the experience of last year's Albert Hash Festival at Whitetop, Virginia. I had been curious how Steve Terrill would work his magic with it, automatically figuring he'd change the photographs to black and white, which was fine with me in full confidence that what Steve does will make a very respectable presentation. As I once heard an old feller say, I was knocked off the log. First, that it was in rich, brilliant color. They were my photographs and it took my breath when I saw Whitetop Mountain Band all the way across the top half of both pages in color that was so nice Steve must have passed his hand over it. Below it Kilby and Amanda Spencer, an intended portrait I took of them during the show. I wanted something of them that made a good portrait of them making music. I was happy he chose the picture of Slate Mountain Ramblers with the heads of the people sitting in front of me in the foreground and other audience heads, then the dancers in the middle ground in full sunlight, and beyond the dancers the band with just enough blur to indicate distance. I was seeing if I could get a picture with three levels of depth, the audience, the dancers, the band. Not trying to get more three-dimensional than a 2-D image allows, but to include the whole into one picture, one above the other, like in a medieval painting.


I like that picture for context. It shows the nature of the tent the audience is sitting under, the nature of the chairs they're sitting in. It shows that it is country people in the audience, dancers between audience and band, the bandstand, and in the distance upstaging the heads in the foreground, the Slate Mountain Ramblers. I love taking pictures of bands at music events. I like to get the pictures from behind the audience, using the zoom lens. I like the tops of heads in the audience. It's how we see when we go to a concert. That day, I was taking pictures for myself to include a few in the blog. I wanted to get pictures from the audience perspective. I don't like to get up close and be obnoxious trying to get an arty cliche picture. I'm not in anybody's way in the back. No sticking my camera up in the face of whoever is sitting behind me.


I was as glad to see that context photo included as the two of Whitetop Mountain Band and Crooked Road Ramblers. Most of all, I was floored by the inclusion of the photo of Thornton Spencer I'd forgotten I'd sent to Steve some time ago. It's my favorite of all photos I've taken. The camera has a half second delay from the time I push the button to the time the camera clicks. It was difficult to control a picture of people in motion, until I caught on to letting the blur define motion. I pushed the button as Thornton sawed the last note. The camera went off as the bow bounced off the string and he lowered the fiddle simultaneously. At first, I thought: Oh no! Then I loved it.


I had not intended or even thought to write something for OTH at the event. Took some pictures toward the blog and made some videos for YouTube. The channel: hobblealong1. You can find them by searching hobblealong1 or names of the bands. If you want to. Judy Carpenter was here and she went with me. We had a great time. The music was supreme all the way through. The audience was all country people, the kind of audience I'm most comfortable in, like at Fairview, Ruritan. I was at home every minute there. Even walking up to the place to pay admission I knew I'd come home. I have a lot of good associations with Whitetop Mountain. Later, after I'd written the blog entry it came to me to write something about it. I imagined somebody had been sent to write an article about it and better pictures than mine would be taken there.


I thought I'd write something from the perspective of somebody in the audience. Maybe it could be a companion piece for the main article with the inside scoop on the bands and the background of the event. I don't know that I've ever seen an article anywhere as seen from the audience. That doesn't mean anything because I've seen a minuscule number of articles in my lifetime to what there are in the world. I don't think I've ever seen any. I'm not a folklorist, so I felt it best to approach the article as an audience member, one of the people that pays to get in. Sarah's minimal editing made it better than I wrote it. She didn't change much, but what she changed made it tremendously better to read. She's as masterful at what she does as Steve is at his job. I feel powerful gratitude to both Sarah and Steve for taking that little ole thing I wrote and making it look awfully good. Thanks from the heart to the entire staff. I have to say I'm honored to have an article in this fine magazine I hold in high respect.     

the slate mountain ramblers at albert hash memorial fest 2011

  *

ROMAN POLANSKI AND THE GHOST WRITER

     roman polanski, 2010

Three days of visiting with friends in the evenings, town trips during the day, not a great deal of sleep, created a need for a day off, a day to sleep late, take a nap, watch two movies. First movie was a kind of documentary about Roman Polanski. I was thinking it was biographical. It turned out to be about his two big horrors in life, the Manson murders of his wife and child, and the experience with American press in the time of being charged with sex with an underage girl. He learned all he needed to know about living in the USA and went to Paris to stay out of prison, where he continues to make films. It turned out to be fairly interesting as I knew nothing of his take on these two brushes with horror in Los Angeles. Perhaps what struck me most was how young he was in his early years of film making. In his years with gray hair, the strain of those times shows in his face. Both experiences left him face down in the dirt. He'll be arrested if he comes back to USA.


The documentary was called, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired. It refers to being wanted in USA and desired in France. Paris is where he belongs, not LA. He's appreciated in Paris. His film The Pianist gives a peep-hole look into the place and time of his childhood in Krakow, Poland, during the German occupation. His mother died in a concentration camp. His father survived the concentration camp. His wife and baby were killed by Charles Manson and "family." This is why Manson is in prison for life and will never be let out. He is our LSD Hannibal Lechter in everyday life. Then he got with a 13 yr old girl and her mother started a big legal issue from it, against the girl's will. Polanski went through the humiliation of the trial, the threat of years behind bars, until the judge in sentencing wanted to nail Polanski to the wall to make himself look good. Both defense and prosecution lawyers agreed the best thing for Polanski to do was leave the country while he was able. It's been since that time he's made what are to my mind his best films.


In the mail came Polanski's 2011 film The Ghost Writer. I took a nap and stayed in bed several hours, 3 or 4, until I was just staying in bed because I didn't want to get up. Couldn't sleep any more. Time to watch The Ghost Writer. First thing, I noticed Ewan McGregor was the actor Woody Allen used in Match Point, his rewrite of Crimes and Misdemeanors. It was not necessarily a happy association for me, because I didn't like Match Point very much. I first saw McGregor in Trainspotting, a creepy movie. I've seen it twice and that's enough. My associations with him were not particularly favorable going into the movie. It wasn't but a few minutes before all that fell away. We were in a new world. Polanski world is leaps and bounds beyond Woody Allen world post Mia Farrow. I was looking at Ewan McGregor as an adult actor and he was up to it. Like Leonardo DiCaprio, McGregor grew up into a mature actor. Through about the first third of the film I'd lost the sense that I was watching a Polanski film. It seemed like a very nicely made film, visually something like a Kieslowski film, then it took a turn, and there was Polanski; our man realizing he was in over his head with no way out.


McGregor's character was hired to be the ghost writer for a recent Brit Prime Minister's memoir, Adam Lang, portrayed by Pierce Brosnan. He was a fictional character for Tony Blair, who played whore of Babylon to Bush's Red dragon, the sequel to Reagan and Thatcher playing the same roles. Brosnan played the role well of a big man living beyond his time of power as an isolated celebrity. The art on the walls in the minimalist house of spare architecture was contemporary, Cy Twombly the only artist I recognized. They were European artists. Twombly lived in Italy. Large abstract canvases of extraordinary colors and textures. Possibly the paintings and sculptures were loaned by a gallery in Paris. That's what it looked like. The house was a museum. At least one painting was in every scene. I spent the entire film in awe of the paintings on the walls and the architecture in the house. It's hard to believe Tony Blair lives with art like was in the film. Blair is too dull for somebody with that kind of art collection. Maybe, if his wife were an independently wealthy art dealer. Didn't matter. I loved seeing the paintings as context for the drama. One of the best was a floor to ceiling window as wide as it was tall that looked onto the landscape outside, photographic realism.


When the plot began to thicken, people and situations became more and more uncomfortable. Intuitively, we know from early on that our man isn't going to make it out of the movie alive. It was something like watching somebody taken down gradually by quicksand. He is isolated on what appears to be an island in the Cape off Massachusetts coast. A ferry runs to and from there, indicating a population that is primarily summer residences. Our friend the ghost writer, whose role is to rewrite the retired Prime Minister's memoirs. From the beginning I felt a sense that he was outside his world altogether, and completely inside their world without recourse. They were the big league of players that used guns and offed inconvenient people. He was a young guy taking a writing job, clueless. When assassins are following him and he's losing them, we get the picture he won't make it much longer. The film is labelled a thriller, and it is. We know something is lurking in the background about to catch up with our friend. He knows it is there too, but doesn't know in what form or when. When it was over, all I could say was, another great Polanski film.   


  *  

TAKE ME TO YOUR LEADER

     robert motherwell


Another shooting incident in Milwaukee, this time several Sikhs at their temple. The white guy with the gun took the Sikhs in turbans for towel-head Ay-rabs. What's the difference? Immigrants. Not white. I saw a posting somebody put on facebook a few days ago of an American Indian with words to the effect that we're concerned about immigrants coming in and taking our land away from us. The man doing the shooting, an adult white male, was bagging some towel-heads for Rush Limbaugh. This morning on the Diane Rhem interview show on NPR, she had some yoyo talking about we have to stop this phenomenon of surprise shootings by going to the source. That is lone wolf white men. Single white men who have been to Vietnam, though not necessarily. Now single white men are preemptive suspects. They need to be "surveiled." I'm thinking it needs to go deeper than that for the cause. Like if we want to cure the problem, let's do away with ignorance. That's not going to happen. It's too late. It's not going to happen anyway. This looks like a time of steady increase of ignorance instead of decrease.


I keep on thinking of a cartoon seen several years ago, a lot of years ago. Two little boys. One tells the other he saw a flying saucer land and a little man came out. The other little boy said, "What'd he say?" "He said, Take me to your leader." "What did you do?" "Nothing." "Why not?" "I didn't know who my leader was." That's how I've felt all my adult life. I'm not sad about it. I'm glad none of the politicians in the country can be called my leader. Not in any way I could tolerate would I call any of them my leader. What a travesty it is that we only have politicians to call our leaders. They are not anybody's leaders. They couldn't lead a pack of dogs by pushing a meat wagon. Some people might think of some of them as their leaders, but I can't imagine who they'd be, unless they would be obedient corporate execs. I feel the same sorrow that possessed Gore Vidal in his last years, sorrow seeing what has become of the home of the brave, the land of the free, all that uplifting belief system we learned as children in school, along with the honor of dying for country.


These shootings by white guys that happen more and more frequently inspire no sociological or psychological investigations into what it is in the society that inspires this behavior. Like Charlton Heston said of American history in Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 911, "We have a lot of blood on our hands." Karma. As a nation, we have killed freely all the way along as if it were our righteous duty as a nation "under God," whatever that means. I can't help but see these surprise "random" shootings as karmic return on a major part of the American character, the right to kill. I see this guy in Aurora, Colorado, entering the exit door of the theater and shooting people by surprise, like I see General Custer with horse hooves covered for silence in first light charging a village with snow muffling the horses' hooves for surprise. They charged in quietly and killed as many as possible, killed their horses. Reading in American history what General George Custer did to the Indians, I couldn't help but be satisfied he met his end at the Little Big Horn. As is said of karma, he had it coming, in abundance. Before he went down, he had the opportunity to see his regiment was being wiped out. How many villages had they wiped out?


On the ship in the Navy, it could be said the captain was my leader, but in my heart and mind, he was not anything to me. He was a player in a game I wanted nothing to do with. In the time of the Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, "crisis," when some communists were making a play for power and the fascist government couldn't handle them, calling on the Americans for assistance. My ship was sent there to "patrol" back and forth across the harbor in front of Santo Domingo. It was a beautiful city from the sea. On watch at night I could see The King And I, the Yul Brynner version, playing on the drive-in theater screen with binoculars. It wasn't like I was distracted by it. Had it been La Dolce Vita, I'd have been distracted for sure. The thrill running through the officers was the chance that we might be able to lob some shells into the city and do some damage. Americanista power. I prayed the whole time we were there that we not fire on the city. I could not tolerate being a part of the American war machine shooting up the poor section of the city. Of course, that's where the terrorists are hiding; in that time they were called communists.


Without public health care, without public psychiatric help, the people needing help don't get it when they're of the working class and can't afford insurance. To politicians that's ok. The working class is the enemy, potential rioters, strikers, the thick-fingered masses. Plus, they don't have any money to give the politicians, who are even worse than preachers at asking for free money. If you're not a source for free money, you don't exist, even if you tell good jokes. I'm glad I don't exist to them, like I'm glad I don't exist for the Jehovah's Witnesses. The last time they stopped here, I ran them off permanently. Nothing here of interest to you, just an old set-in-his-ways heathen. The new people to go around in the cars browbeating people in their own homes are told when they pass my house to keep away from that old man, he might shoot you. I don't know that for a fact, but I do imagine what they say is an exaggerated version of whatever it is I said or did that they understood all those years ago. Whatever it is, it keeps them away. No need to question a good thing.


We have such a hard-edged martial society where big college jocks on steroids bash into each other in mosh pits to hard-core punk at concerts. There is an underlying hostility between men who go around with chips on their shoulders looking for anybody to knock one off by looking at him wrong. In Glade Creek several years ago a man had an acre of ground covered by 55gal barrels standing above the ground on posts with a gamecock attached by tether to the barrel that was his home. Chicken prison was all I could think. I felt sad for those poor chickens having to live. Something like that makes me then feel sorry for all the domestic animals around the globe that are regarded without soul, without consciousness, without feeling, without emotion, without even awareness. Then it gets so immense I can't handle that thinking any more and have to let it go as something beyond my mental capacities. I accept on a deeper level how things are. Acceptance is what I want more and more of in myself. I find the more I accept the context of my life, the easier my life can be.


*

THE HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS - ZHANG YIMOU

Watched The House Of Flying Daggers again tonight with my friends from Georgia visiting for a few days. It's my friends the Carpenters, Lucas and Judy, from Conyers, Georgia, off I-20 east of Atlanta. Daughter Meredith and her husband Greg, here from San Francisco, came with them, and Greg's mother, Ruth, from Chicago. We ate a good meal prepared by Meredith and Greg, PhDs in biology and chemistry, respectively, as good in the kitchen as they are in the laboratory. Meredith is working in a new field involving DNA from ancient teeth, like Leakey's Lucy, that kind of ancient. I'd left about a dozen DVDs there last time Lucas and Judy were here. Greg and Meredith chose The House Of Flying Daggers. I was happy to see it again. Haven't seen it in a few years. Looking at what I love about it, I find it is largely a visual fest of colors and flowing lines. The story is simple and complex. It actually is both. It's very simple. And it's rather complex. Early on, Judy asked of one of the actors, Takeshi Kaneshiro, "Is he a bad guy?" I didn't know what to say. I never think of characters in terms of good guys and bad guys. I just watch and see what happens. I said I didn't know. I've seen the film half a dozen times, but never thought of him as a good or bad guy. Now that it's over, I can't see that either word has meaning for his character. He was both and neither.


It always does me good to see Zhang Ziyi in any film she's in. I believe she had a small, but notable role in Lust-Caution, the film of the underground resistance during the Japanese occupation of China in the 1930s. She was the ninja girl who stole the sword and flew through the air with it in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon. She had a role in The Hero with Jet Li, most memorable in the sword fight among the trees full of falling red leaves blowing around them in the wind, her last scene. I think it's Maggie Chung who defeated her in the scene of swirling reds. Zhang Yimou, the director, makes some gorgeous films, lush with colors, with flow, with feeling. His stories are minimal, yet emotionally complex. In a big gray palace with huge columns, silk draperies of yellow-green suspended from the ceiling made a flowing labyrinth for a sword fight between the king and a would-be assassin. In The House Of The Flying Daggers, the sword fight at the end happens in a landscape of autumn in full color. Snow starts falling as the sword fight goes on. By the time the fight is over, the snow is about 4 inches deep. Another time, I watched the brief documentary, the Making Of, that goes with the film. Zhang Yimou said while they were filming the sword fight the snow started falling and he decided to go ahead and keep on filming as the snow fell. It made a scene that was out of this world and very much of this world.


The visuals in varieties of forest in autumn, vertical dark lines with the pointilist orange and yellow dots of leaves among them, vertical white lines with pointilist yellow leaves. Then there is the bamboo grove of vertical green bamboo poles with leaves growing up high in the canopy. Running through the vertical green lines, soldiers in green uniforms striding through leafy air above, chasing Zhang Ziyi and her partner, Takeshi Kaneshiro the good guy/bad guy. She's in love with him, but the other one, Andy Lau, is in love with her, has waited for her 3 years. They're the ones who sword fought in the end. At the beginning, they were army buddies stationed together, men loyal to the emperor, or so we believed then. Much deception going on, which is uncovered, step by step, by sequence of events, until at the very end all deceptions come clean. Andy Lau played the man in waiting for three years, a member of the House of the Flying Daggers, also a spy inside the Chinese army. In Hong Kong, Andy Lau is a director of some good men-with-guns films, romantic comedies, and he acts in several of his films. He's one of the Chinese actors and directors of note in this time. He makes a good gangster movie. Search his name at netflix and a long list of movies come up.


By now I've seen most of Zhang Yimou's films, all the ones I can find at netflix, each of them several times. They're the kinds of films I watch a second time before returning them. Landscape is important in all his films. This one used the landscape of forest from the inside, then at the end seeing it from a meadow outside the forest. In a forest like the horses were running and walking through, no limbs were on the ground, no low-growing limbs, the ground evenly carpeted in fallen leaves at the same time the trees are full of colored leaves. The entire screen is covered with golden reddish orange of autumn leaves on the ground and in the trees, vertical dark lines of tree trunks, a man in a purple robe riding his horse through the scene, sometimes walking, sometimes running. Zhang Ziyi wears a flowing yellow-green outfit -- can't call it a dress, can't call it a robe -- running through the bamboo forest of vertical green lines just a shade darker than her clothes. He, the Japanese actor Takeshi Kaneshiro, wore purple through the scenes of vertical green lines and the scenes of the vertical dark lines with the golden ground below and leaves above.


I hold Zhang Yimou up there with other directors like Ole Bornedal of Denmark, Ingmar Bergman of Sweden, Kristof Kieslowski and Roman Polanski of Poland, Andrei Tarkovsky of Russia, several from France, Kurosawa of Japan, Peter Greenaway from England, Lars von Trier of Denmark. I know before I start a film by Zhang Yimou, I will be satisfied all the way through it, every scene. He also made Raise The Red Lantern from a short novel by Su Tong. He enhanced the story visually, made it a fest of colors and shapes, beautifully dressed people moving among the symphonies of both brilliant and dull, warm colors around them that sometimes are cold. His film, Ju Dou, with Gong Li, happens in a place that dyes silk red. Red silk banners hang drying and flowing in the breeze through much of the film. The first time I saw it was without subtitles. Saw it later with subtitles and all I missed was names and relationships, like uncle, cousin, like that. I've seen Raise The Red Lantern several times and read the novel, know the story fairly well. It's time to see it without subtitles. I may want to look at other of his films without subtitles. I find I see the colors and compositions much better without the words to read. I don't mind reading them, but that time I saw Ju Dou without subtitles was memorably beautiful. It taught me I don't need to understand literal meanings. The tone of voice of what the actors are saying often carries the meaning. I like to hear the Chinese language too. I hear it best without subtitles. The House Of The Flying Daggers would be good without subtitles. The visuals tell the story and words fill in the blanks.


*