Slowly Sinking into the Summer

At the moment of this writing (June 28th) we're having a wonderful cool wave, weather that would more typically reside up in Elkins, West Virginia, where Libby and I went to teach fiddle and guitar to aspiring adults back a few decades ago. It's noon and less than 80, and I'm tempted to go find a light sweat shirt. Before this break we were having something like the edge of a Gulf tropical storm, with a great deal of rain, humidity, lighting, and temps in the 90s. This more typical Piedmont NC summer weather apparently wreaked hell on many of the little civilizing details that make camping out in the Chatham County woods as we do a possibly reasonable solution to life in the 2000s. The land line phone has been disabled for more than a week now, offering only a nasty buzz for a dial tone, and no sign of a voice should it happen to ring at all. Our theory there is that the rings are from earnest technicians from Century Link, out in the “field” somewhere or other, testing the wires. When the rings happen, if we have the Dish on, it freezes the Dish Box and we have to reboot the whole shebang. Other than that, nothing changes. The internet was also out for about a week, but around midnight last night it sorta returned, with weak speeds but actually access to web mail and websites.

To make things substantially worse, we are down to one working truck, and that one has only high beams. The lowest mileage vehicle, a '99 S-10, has suddenly contracted a broken clutch pedal linkage. We've been able using the blinky internet to determine likely fixes—it's a connection just on the other side of the bottom of the dashboard judging by the symptoms. I had found a guy last week to come out and haul the poor dear in to his shop, but he never showed, and since the phone was out it might have been only that he could never call to be sure we were home. I keep thinking I can get under the steering wheel and pull the bolts that hold the under panel on, but when I get to the point of that contortion I end up aborting the process, plus there are a couple of bolts I'm not sure about removing—since I can't see entirely what the consequences are, and they seem to relate to the computer gizmo that the inspectors use to inspect the vehicle. So we sit. Libby reported last night that the dome light in the S-10 didn't come on like it should have. Sitting may be wearing the battery down.

On the other hand, early last week, before all the troubles really set in, I'd bought a good battery charger to get the Ford's new battery going so I could move it out of the way. The Ford has a dead short somewhere or other. I ain't lying in the high grass with the ticks to try to find it, not that I particularly know how to find a short anyways. I'd taken in the Ford's battery when it wouldn't crank at all, this being the second time that happened this year. We don't run the Ford much anyways, it's a fire-wood hauler, '91 150. The place I got the dead battery from just shrugged and gave me another one, so I knew that was good when the no-crank symptom returned. The charger worked great. The guy at the battery place said it's probably a dead short, but you can unhook the neg terminal when you're not running and keep the battery alive that way. So that's the near term plan for the Ford. Before you start, open the hood, slip the neg terminal on the post, then crank. Don't be making no jokes about Dog Patch.

So far the Toyota keeps running. But if you need lights it's high beams or nothing. That's likely a short in the switch, which is built into the steering column. I'm hopeful we can get a new switch and get the housing behind the wheel off and put the new one in. And not find out it's something down in the column, in the wiring. That's not where I want to go, and particularly when the Toyo is the only truck that's running.

I keep enjoying the cool breeze coming in the window here in the kitchen. I'm not thinking about climbing up on the roof to try to re-nail the ridge cap where I'm pretty sure the rain comes in when it blows from the north east. And don't get me started on the upper cabin roof, which was so damn shiny and new back in '79, the year Anna was born. After coming on 40 years it's needing some paint, or better, fresh tin. It's amazing how expensive tin has got in nearly 40 years, and how steep that upper roof looks these days.

It's been three weeks plus since the Old Vet died. The family had a really nice memorial gathering for him down in Tarboro, with a lot of his old friends and most of the living family turning out. Libby made some great cakes, there was punch and other tasty edibles. After the gathering the family went out to the cemetery and stood around Rudy and Lucille's shared gravesite and people talked about little moments they remembered from the family gatherings, from growing up in that little eastern NC town on the Tar River. We'd rented a car to do the trip with air conditioning. I drove it back to Chapel Hill, where it'd rented it, Monday morning, and cranked up the S-10 to get back home. I think that was the last time the pedal worked. Close damn call.

This weekend it's Fourth of July. I doubt it'll be less than 95, but maybe the rains will stay away and things will keep drying out. We're hoping by then the fleas will be gone at last. We gave all the kitties doses of that stuff that's supposed to kill fleas by making them sterile. It's clear the fleas know something's afoot. Tiny ones huddle on the floor, and jump on our legs if we happen to go too close to their huddles. The cats, meanwhile, are all sitting on tables and spending even more time than usual grooming. The Ezra Pound ditty keeps coming to mind, from his fuck you book called Pavannes and Divagations: “Lud us sing godam.” It was a parody of an ancient English song called “Summer is icomen in.” Pound substituted “winter” and added “godam.” I don't believe this is the book that includes his essay comparing Mussolini to Thomas Jefferson. That was earlier, in the heady times before fascism could no longer be viewed as primarily an attempt to rescue high art from the Communists and the Jews. I've searched the google for a photo of Pound in a baseball cap saying “Make Europe Great Again.” Apparently no photo exists. The photo above is from '49, Pound's mug shot. In late May, '45, Pound turned himself in to the US Army in immediate post-war Italy. He had been giving propaganda radio broadcasts for the Italian Government during the war, and had been charged by the United States with treason in 1943. As he was a noted poet in the pantheon—he'd advised Eliot on the Waste Land and published great long poetic tracts including the Pisan Cantos as he descended into what now passes as Republicanism—the US put him in a mental institution in Washington, DC, for a number of years, then finally let him return to Italy to live out his final days. He was featured on the cover of Life as an ancient geezer, wandering the Italian streets in a straw hat and beard and muttering that some of the lines in his great work, the Cantos, were “wrong.”

https://www.openlettersmonthly.com/attainted-the-life-and-afterlife-of-ezra-pound-in-italy/

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1480293.Pavannes_and_Divagations

Milo's Game

The right wing is always about oppression, censorship, closeting, the smooth beautiful surface of things, the windless pond. Also about shame and guilt, when these tools can be applied to other people. And so an excellent applicator of shame, guilt and oppression is a first person account, a confession, which at least in some belief systems is a mystical incantation which removes shame and guilt in the telling. Milo grew up in such a belief system. And so he discovered the delicious rococo experience of being over and over again guilty and shamed and then immediately forgiven by his father-priest-lover. It is something Norman Mailer has also waxed poetic about. Mailer always said good sex requires some guilt. And just this morning I found (via Sheila O'Malley) W.H.Auden's remarkable stanza on the subject:

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

[From September 1, 1939, W.H. Auden]
http://www.sheilaomalley.com/?p=64924

O'Malley's whole essay on Auden, a birthday present from her to one of her poetic heroes, is worth reading, and several times. One of the larger features of her homage to Auden brings into focus the extent to which the poetic effort, which might be, along with it's twin masterpiece, Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, a kind of high-water mark of western thought, has been mostly obscured if not even entirely forgotten, by our sad contemporary culture as a whole. Auden saw in the work of T.S. Eliot what might be done by a capable poet. He worked at it. The culture, meanwhile, eventually produced Trump.

But all this early 20th Century clarity floats atop the cultural mud and silt of the authoritarian family, which founds the authoritarian church and the authoritarian state. There are always too many private interests to be nurtured. The teacher-father-priest finds it such a simple and easy task to re-seduce again the willing eleven-year-old, just one more time, in the quiet rectory, under the polished leather-scented desk, the pretty boy's cheek resting against the bristly upper thigh, the faint hint of urine, the hot hard shaft enfolded by the soft sweet mouth. Oh, did I mention as well, two world wars?

So Milo became a willing witness in the end, and for his own reasons, financial and otherwise. He could attack feminism, which is women un-closeted. He could attack the whole effort by gays and lesbians to get out of the shadow of guilt and shame by being himself a flaming homosexual who relished the shame and guilt, and suggested in the doing that all the others, the scape-goat caste, in fact were just what the priest always whispered as he came into little Milo's soft and open mouth--”perverted.”

Poor little Milo, protege to power, suddenly Bannon's successor, editor-in-chief at Brietbart, the journal of dirty tricks brought now into almost absolute power or so it must have felt in the heady post-election days of 2016. All of Milo's witness was, to the right, proof of what they always thought, and probably to a significant extent what they themselves actually experienced in their own lives. The effort to put an end to living the closeted life has been mightily resisted by much of the culture. Great battles have been fought over the definition of the so-called “institution” of marriage, over who can and who can't be married. The churchy complain of political correctness and demand, as part of their allegedly religious practice, the right to crucify on a cold dusty road in the vastness of Wyoming. The simplicity of love is immediately trampled in the service of the old institution of caste and repression. Auden, a gay man living in a closeted time, understood, but resisted. Milo saw an easier path, and Bannon laid his cape over the mud so that Milo wouldn't dirty his silver slippers.

As Edroso said today, Milo didn't realize that there were still a few hard limits, if he wanted to retain his unlimited pass.

http://alicublog.blogspot.com/2017/02/youre-invisible-now-you-got-no-secrets.html

Bannon didn't do quite enough vetting, and the horse was out of the barn before he realized he'd be ascending to the White House. Milo could invent child sex rings run by Hillary Clinton, and covens. He could say such vile things to a noted comic, Leslie Jones, that he could be banned from twitter. But as we have just seen, he could not take Plato's position on the seduction of boys by men, directly supporting the ancient idea that sent Wilde to gaol, without losing at least the bully pulpit of a conservative institution that also embraces fundamentalist Christians, who are the undefeated champions of American moral hypocrisy. If he was going to present a first-person defense of the indefensible, he could not also be a shining champion of American conservative thought. At least not to most of the notable conservative talking heads, or to Simon and Schuster.

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/news/milo-yiannopoulos-book-deal-canceled-simon-schuster-paedophilia-podcast-dangerous-a7590706.html

But the repressive right-wing thesis about gay people has always been that they are fundamentally perverted. This is the “reason” the authoritarian part of society and culture wants homosexuals to remain closeted. This is the pseudo theological logic of the Fundamentalist church, and when missionaries go out to Uganda, gay Ugandans actually get killed. For that matter, now and then gay Americans get killed too. It's not exactly what Milo wants as he testifies to the fundamental perversion he enjoys personifying, and certainly he doesn't want anyone to kill him! But he's insulated. His sugar daddy is now a member of the National Security Council.

This was his game. Be a right-wing Mick Jagger. Hope the Hell's Angel you hired to protect you doesn't see through the shit-storm and smack you across the head with a pool cue in the middle of Street-Fighting Man. Turns out this little bit of his own perversion now floats in the middle of the punch bowl. Now he has to make a choice, poor little Milo. Send the manuscript to Grove Press, where he can join the list with Celine, not to mention Joyce and Terry Southern. A publisher he can find. Irony isn't dead. The Catholic priesthood is vivid testimony, and it's the tip of the iceberg. But if he lets his freak fly, what's a poor boy gonna do, sing in a rock and roll band. That train may have left the station.

The trouble is, authoritarianism is a great, centuries-old complicated lie. Milo got the threads crossed up. Our trouble is, almost no one reads Eliot, or Auden. The road maps have mostly been forgotten, or never even seen. It's all just too difficult. Voters think any change is Change. Tell it to the survivors of Hiroshima.

Dan Hicks Too?

The Firm (Craver, Hicks, Watson, Newberry Combo) went on a road trip in early March. Stops in Portland, Spokane, Seattle, then Portland, one two three four, with a long flight going and coming. Out it was thick clouds till past the ole Mississip, then the clouds broke, and over western Nebraska I felt like the only difference I could see was apparently down there was atmosphere, as opposed to Mars or the Moon. By Saturday night, in Seattle, I was coming down with the flu. There was a late-night session at the place we were staying, an old friend from the music scene around here when I was just starting out on the fiddle, Bertram Levy had come down to see the show from Port Townsend and brought his wife and daughter, daughter Madeline being about 20 and an excellent fiddler, so the session was really a lot of fun, but it squeezed the last energy out of me, and the flight back was a blur. After that I slept for about a week, which worked out ok too, as it used up my vacation time before the joint closed down for good on April Fool's Day Friday a week ago.

Somewhere in there I recall someone, maybe it was our hosts in Portland, Nancy Conescu and Mike Doolin, noting that Dan Hicks had passed away. I didn't hardly believe it, but after I got back and more or less well I looked it up, and sure enough, Dan's gone. I'd have sent him a note. I've had a long relationship with Dan Hicks, even if he never was aware of it.

Back in '69 I took a permanent vacation from my first marriage and rode out to San Francisco with a couple of buds in an early '60s Chevy pickup. It looked like this as we started out on our adventure:

We drove out in four days, not stopping except for gas till about 30 hours into it, at Elk City, OK, where there was an inviting motel right on the highway--Route 66, which was getting replaced bit by bit with I-40. I have no idea what the name of that motel was, but there was an excellent Mexican restaurant with or very near the place, where I first had green salsa (it being 1969, these commonplaces were not such, back in lil ole NC where we started out). We pushed on after some damn good sleep, three of us on the bench, seatbelts? are you kidding. We stopped for a great breakfast in Flagstaff, and drove up to the South Rim, peered over the edge and into the abyss, then set out for Needles, Barstow, San Bernadino, with Bakersfield thrown in for good measure, where we stopped at the very apex of the famed "Bakersfield Grade" to lay a beer can on the center line to see which way it would roll, it being a quiet 3 AM or so. We motelled it again in Bakersfield, then drove up the Central Valley towards San Francisco, stopping only to put out a smoldering fire in the bed of the truck, so loaded down that the wood boards that had replaced the steel deck in spots had been riding on the exhaust pipe.

Anyways, after some days reconnoitering Height and figuring out how to hitch-hike over to Oakland to see my sister, I rode with Mac Benford and a a bunch of Oakland old-timey musicians over to the Family Dog Ballroom on the beach in San Francisco, where as I recall they opened for Dan Hicks and his Hot Licks. I'd never heard such music. Over a time I got all the records he'd made, two or three I think it was. By then I was helping to build the Red Clay Ramblers. RCR didn't do much obvious swing material, but I'd say my song Play "Rocky Top" had a lot of Dan's attitude, and was about as Django-ed as we could manage at that time. I've kept up with that one, and the Combo plays it better now than back then, on the Frizz LP, in my considered opinion of course.

I didn't know for decades what had happened to Dan. When Libby and I got together, after I'd left the Ramblers in '81, it turned out that she was a Dan Fan too. In the late '80s we worked up two of his songs, Evening Breeze and Reelin' Down. About 2001 or so Dan showed up on the calendar at the Cat's Cradle, the Chapel Hill music club that started about the same time as the Ramblers and has bounced around the streets of Heels Town, a variety of locations. I've seen some good music there through the years, and none better than that Dan Hicks show.

Libby and I had actually recorded those two Hicks' songs on our CD, "South of Nowhere." It was fairly fresh, so I brought a copy to give to the master, who was famously irascible. I spotted him at the bar, nursing a mineral water, well before show time, and approached him gingerly. "Scuse me," I said, "could I bother you for a second." The plan was to give him the CD, tug my forelock, scurry away to my seat near the front of the stage. "Naw," he said. That was that.

The show was fantastic. Tight, great playing, Dan's expected dry delivery. He put a stool out beside where he'd be standing, and put some picks and a capo on it. Deep into the show he picked up the capo and displayed it to the audience. "This is a capo," he said. "We're going to do 'I Have a Capo On My Brain' next." He put it back down on the stool, never to use it. It was a prop.

After the show I caught the fiddler and gave him the CD to give to Dan, telling him we'd covered his songs. "Hope you paid the royalties," he said. "Dan'll come after you." Fortunately we had. Possibly a letter from Dan's copyright lawyers would be of more value, looking back on it now. I'd frame it and hang it somewhere visible.

Now he's gone, this wry genius. Saw he lived for many years in Mill Valley and would say "hi" to Maria Muldaur at the PO. Here's one of his songs I never heard, performed on TV in the late '80s:



Baby Jesus is putting together a hell of a band this year.

Merle Haggard

Sheila O'Malley has a sweet remembrance up at her blog. Also Lawyers, Guns and Money has several posts and youtubes up. The loss is stupendous. Everest has crumbled, Gibraltar has tumbled, as it were. My way of looking at music is a lot like Pollock's way of looking at painting: the actual painting is actually an evidence of activity which is now past and over. Music is a doing, an event. The whole studio deal is a complex instrument for actualizing ideas which reside in the mind of the producing musician(s). So you can indeed end up with some weird shit, such as the two guys who are Steely Dan not even playing on some of their work, but still putting it on a Steely Dan LP. Or Laura Nyro creating tracks out of 50 bits of different takes played over a year (Dale Asnby, our engineer on "Chuckin' the Frizz," our live CD from 1979, told me that anecdote as we mixed the album up in his New Jersey home base studio--he'd been Laura's engineer too, and specialized in incredible remote location recordings).

So of course, my favorite bits of Merle Haggard are the live ones. This one is simply perfect, and gets better with every listen. I love Merle's singing, but I also love his extended break. He's going to do one time around, but then goes for one and three-quarters, leaving the last fourth for the great fiddler, who plays a perfect ending section. They'd probably done that whole arrangement before, given that Haggard and the Strangers were working almost constantly at that time, but there's still a life to it, a quality of in-the-moment. You shouldn't play it the same way twice, you should just confront the music in the moment. That's what I try to do when I'm playing, whether it's songs or dance tunes for a ten-minute contra-dance.



He left us so much we can keep on listening for a long long time. One of the folks at Lawyers, Guns and Money posted the Hag's "If I Could Only Fly," a Blaze Foley song of haunting beauty. Check that one out too, and also Merle's live rendition of "Long Black Limousine."



Sheila says in her post, apropos the fact that Merle Haggard died on his birthday: He went out of this world with his fans all thinking about him already. What a tender, heart-rending remark.