A Wedding, A Separation

I ran into this video this morning on a website called "Why Evolution is True."



Yesterday Libby and I went to a perfect wedding. It was held out in the country near Saxapahaw, NC, on an organic farm. The farmers catered the wedding, serving delicious barbeque and baked beans. There were puffy white clouds in the brilliant blue September sky. In North Carolina we get two different Septembers, the ones with hurricanes, and the ones like this present one, fairly dry, not overly hot, a gentle procession into the coming fall. Most of the leaves are still green, but a few early plants, at the edge of the woods, have changed to scarlet. I meant to take a photo of one of these little bushes with sharp, narrow leaves last time I mowed. They look spray painted. I used to love September without resevation, having experienced Hurricane Hazel long ago, as a child, where it was mostly an adventure that passed and caused no personal damage. But then came the hurricanes of the '90s, and we were living on Ocracoke Island, where one takes notice and must decide, over and over again, what to do, whether to leave. There were many opportunities. Two notables: Hurricane Fran, in '96, and Hurricane Floyd, in '99. Floyd was particularly devastating to North Carolina as it caused wide-spread flooding which nearly isolated the coastal plain from the rest of the state, and killed over 50 people, mostly folks who drove across flooded roadways and were swept away.

Behind the stage where Libby and I played music as the celebrants chatted and sipped, there was a field of yellow flowers. Amongst the flowers were probably 12 or so Guinea hens, industriously hunting for food. When I walked up to the stage they all popped their heads up and buzzed with alarm. After I stood there a while they went back to their grazing. In these parts it's said that Gunieas will get rid of ticks. We didn't get bit. It might be a plan!

September, after Fran and Floyd, became a month I didn't look forward to much. But at the moment, meaning this year, it seems that hurricanes are not threatening us here on the eastern seaboard. Out in the Pacific it's a different story. Anyways, yesterday was a perfect day for an outdoor wedding. The bride was beautiful, her family was really terrific, and Libby and I got to play some music and visit with some old friends and generally have a very nice day. Today seems a repeat, and we're doing a nice cookout today up in Greensboro celebrating the various family birthdays that occur in September, the month with the most birthdays according to someone in the office. It's certainly got the most birhdays in our family.

We got home after dark, unpacked the music gear. Then we watched the Iranian film, A Separation. This is what films used to be like, that is, it has some depth and seriousness and is interested in a story about real life inhabited by real people. It might be called The Turn of the Screw, but that title is pretty much taken. It is a story about earnest, good people who despite their efforts grow more and more entangled in tragedy and despair. They are all caught in a web. The web is their principles and good intentions. No one has magic powers or an automatic pistol. The film should be viewed by anyone who blathers on about incinerating Iran if it doesn't kow-tow to the desires of the West. If he could find within himself some ability to sit still and think, it would benefit Mr. Trump to watch this film. It's an unlikely thought experiment I know.

Mr. Trump has decided to run as George Wallace. There's no way around this conclusion. Back in '68, Wallace would have loved to have been running as the candidate of one of the two major parties. Instead, both parties rejected him, and he was forced to mount a third-party effort, arguing like Trump today that "there's not a dime's worth of difference" between the two major parties and their candidates. This is a new experiment for us, or perhaps an old one that we thought was relegated to the ash heap. Trump is running on straight-up racism and prejudice. He has nothing but a great stack of lies concerning people who are in various ways "different" from the white people in the country who think it their right as white Christians to have the final say in governance, and who think anytime they don't get that final say, something undemocratic has happened. Trump wants to see if that cohort of bitterness is big enough and engaged enough to win a Presidential election. He's saying now, straight up, vote Trump, vote your hate.

There is such a vast distance from that little field we played fiddle tunes in yesterday, full of happy people immersed in the "golden hour," and the bitterness of Trump's campaign. It's surely at least as far as the distance from the sun to Neptune. Out there, in the bitter black, there is nothing else but ice, even if gravity still works its magic, and the center "holds." As the twilight advances, Libby and I chatted with two old friends we hadn't seen in several years. This is how it is at weddings. It was very heartening to discover that they saw these realities as we did. If one just watched "the news," which is pretty much what all of us do now, one might eventually begin to believe in the terrors that animate the typical Trump supporter.

Mr. Reagan set this loose back in the '80s, when he got rid of the so-called "Fairness Doctrine." That little vandalism, almost unnoticed in the glare of Iran-Contra and the destruction of the Air Traffic Controller union, and grounded in the idea that the blind marketplace will sort out truth from fiction, has opened the door to a media of lies. Now millions believe that a small, rural community of Muslims who live together to practice their faith is in fact some terrorist training camp. Yesterday, Mr. Trump promised to end the war on Christmas. Libby reported this Trump news after I'd gone up to bed. She said Trump's promise was actually the war on Christmas. This is as strange as a guy named Les Izmore running for State Comptroller.

PS--Donald Trump is Running for President

SEK at Lawyers Guns and Money posted the following yesterday:

Many people are posting versions of “never forget.”

So let’s review, shall we?

1) The 9/11 hijackers were funded by rich people in Saudi Arabia, none of whom have been punished for it.

2) President Bush had ample and direct warnings that Al Queda was a threat yet failed to take them seriously.

3) One security technology could have prevented the hijackings — secure and solid cockpit doors. The airlines fought FAA proposals for them for decades.

4) Iraq had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks but more than 10 years later more than half of Republicans still believed it did.

5) For one brief moment almost the whole world was united in horror about the slaughter. Yet our government dissolved that unity within 18 months.

6) The mania that gripped the White House in the wake of 9/11 generated massive violations of US and international law, significant violations of human rights, and a squandering of the moral high ground.

7) If the Supreme Court had allowed the voters to choose the president in the 2000 election we would have had sober, moderate, law-abiding, knowledgeable adults running the country and things would be a lot better now.

8) President Bush not only failed to defend us against Al Queda before 9/11, he let Bin Laden escape from Tora Bora and ceased serious efforts to capture or kill him while he shifted U.S. resources to a country that had nothing to do with 9/11.

Yeah, I am still angry.

You should be, too.

Never forget.

He credits this list to Siva Vaidhyanathan.

I would suggest that just as the past flows seamlessly back to the hysterical Bill Clinton Impeachment, which was led by one of the current Republican candidates, Lindsey Graham, so too it flows forward, to the remarkable fact that Donald Trump currently leads the Republican field, and may end up being the next United States President. Truly, something is slouching towards Golgotha, waiting to be born.

_______________________

Here's a first person account.

http://www.sheilaomalley.com/?p=86971#comment-2449640

If you go to this link you will find, first, a remarkable account of terror, from the inside out. Ms O'Malley is a terrific writer, and captures something very deep in this description of her own life on September 11, 2001, and the following days. In one way of looking at this history, the events themselves stand alone, particular, unique. Individuals all experienced the tragedy, and those very close to it, like Ms O'Malley, were literally swept away by the moments. I was particularly struck by the moment when people hid under benches in Central Park as they listened to jets overhead, before it was understood that these were "our" jets, protecting New York City at last from further assault. To understand this moment you simply had to be there. I was not. From a far distance, my experience of the event was necessarily quite different: amazement, horror yes, but not immediate fear, or a sense of group or mass fear, or the participation in that as a phenomenon. Again, the same thing later, when Sheila leaves her office because there are crowds in the street, and flows with the crowd many blocks away from her office. While it's possible that this has been described elsewhere, I'd never seen such a description. It required being in New York City. Respecting and appreciating this particularity remains important, and the many swirling feelings around this experience obviously remain as well, something I didn't realize when I commented on the piece. As I've noted in my links, Ms O'Malley unfailingly creates one of the best blogs I've ever seen.

Labor Day 2015

I read this morning somewhere that there are no longer any union mines in Harlan County, KY. I looked up the UMW on the Google and got a bunch of articles about how Obama is anti-coal. The people who run the energy extraction sector can manage two non-contradictory things at once: they can keep Obama at bay, and also destroy unions. Reminds me of a story I read once in the New Yorker, where a mom says to her friend, "well at least they can't be having sex while they're driving around the night at a high rate of speed." And then her kid, who's lying concealed on the couch as mom and her friend walk by the door to the den having this conversation, pops her head up and says, "why not?"

I have to hope that there's something more stable about reasonableness than about the frightening things that swirl around us this Labor Day. Why would ISIS blow up a 2000 year old temple? I used to wonder, back when I was looking at my dad's old set of Britanicas, who in the world would shoot holes in the Spinx, or break the arms off Venus De Milo. I'd be listening to the old Chess 45 of Chuck Berry, looking at the pictures. "Marlo Venus was a beautiful (l)ass, had the world in the palm of her hand, lost both her arms in a wrestling match, to meet a brown-eyed handsome man..." The "(l)ass" was provided by a kid down the street, who had a dirtier mind than I did, and played '45s of Hank Ballard and the Midnighters singing "Annie Had a Baby."

A month after Labor Day in '56 I was walking home from school and saw a headline in the paper rack at Cameron Village (first mall in NC), "Larsen pitches no hitter." This was in the World Series. The games then were in the afternoon. Sometimes the Principal would play them on the PA system, and then we'd walk home and see the last inning or two as the long shadows crossed Yankee Stadium (where all World Series were played). At the movies later in the week we could watch a round up of the games, brief clips of big plays, Martin and Mantle and Yogi, grizzled Casey Stengel opining about what would happen next, Whitey Ford on the mound, or Allie Reynolds, who was a Creek Indian before he was a Cleveland Indian.

I think of that headline, Larsen pitches no hitter, quite a bit. I can see the green paper rack, and where it sat, under a covered sidewalk running along the top tier of shops in Cameron Village. The Village was more than a mall--it was a whole neighborhood of retail stores, just about anything you might want to buy being offered in one or the other. There was a dry cleaners, a hobby shop, a drugstore, a bank, several big department stores, a music store with little booths where you could play a cut or two of a record before buying it. I'd walk through the Village on the way from home to high school, but that was a few years off. I must have been coming from junior high that day, since Fred Olds, where I went to grammar school, was situated such that I'd be home before I ever got to the Village. Maybe I was going to get the papers for my paper route. I delivered the Raleigh Times, the paper sporting that headline, after school. It was a nice job, way better than setting pins in the bowling alley behind our house, which was what I did for a little while during this same period of time, mid-'50s, Raleigh, NC.


Copyright © 2000-2011.
All Rights Reserved by Baseball Almanac, Inc.
www.baseball-almanac.com
Baseball Almanac Box Scores

Brooklyn Dodgers 0, New York Yankees 2
Game played on Monday, October 8, 1956 at Yankee Stadium
Brooklyn Dodgers ab r h rbi
Gilliam 2b 3 0 0 0
Reese ss 3 0 0 0
Snider cf 3 0 0 0
Robinson 3b 3 0 0 0
Hodges 1b 3 0 0 0
Amoros lf 3 0 0 0
Furillo rf 3 0 0 0
Campanella c 3 0 0 0
Maglie p 2 0 0 0
Mitchell ph 1 0 0 0
Totals 27 0 0 0

New York Yankees ab r h rbi
Bauer rf 4 0 1 1
Collins 1b 4 0 1 0
Mantle cf 3 1 1 1
Berra c 3 0 0 0
Slaughter lf 2 0 0 0
Martin 2b 3 0 1 0
McDougald ss 2 0 0 0
Carey 3b 3 1 1 0
Larsen p 2 0 0 0
Totals 26 2 5 2
Brooklyn 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 – 0 0 0
New York 0 0 0 1 0 1 0 0 x – 2 5 0

E–None. DP–Brooklyn 2 Reese-Hodges, Hodges-Campanella-Robinson-Campanella-Robinson. HR–New York Mantle (3,4th inning off Maglie 0 on 2 out). Team LOB–0. SH–Larsen (1,off Maglie). Team–3. U–Babe Pinelli, Hank Soar, Dusty Boggess, Larry Napp, Tom Gorman, Ed Runge. T–2:06. A–64,519.

It was about this time, this era, that the NC Legislature passed an early version of the big lie law, the "right to work" law. Michigan now has a "right to work" law, as does Wisconsin. Amazing. I told my writing friend Boyce the other day that this great unraveling we're living in probably started with the end of the Raleigh Times. That came about the same time as the end of day baseball. (the Cubs kept it going, like AmTrak, for a few more decades. I know. I went to 5 day games in a row at Wrigley Field back in '78 or '79, while some of the other Red Clay Ramblers were making the Carter Family record, "Meeting in the Air." They were recording in Chicago and we stayed at the Flying Fish Records office, which was an old frame house next to some tracks which, if you walked them, took you straight to Wrigley Field after about a mile and a half. Now that was a magic secret passage.)

We're pretty far along in this historic disaster. Who's to say we won't end up with Trump. If we do get him, we'll find out if the basic conflict between democratic choice and rational survival has the obvious resolution. On a smaller scale we are already picking survival at every juncture. The NSA still sifts all our records (hi, fellers, happy labor day to ya!). Yesterday a former spokesman for the survivalists, General Powell, said he thought the Iran agreement made sense. That was the most hopeful piece of news I saw this weekend.

The gigantic wave of refugees was kicked off by an incompetent foreign policy disaster led by Powell's superiors, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. I'd imagine that the Army learned its lesson. Then again, military folks believe in chain of command. We see that story all the time. Maybe no one will save us from democracy. In which case, realities will eventually teach us once again all the many things we have managed to forget in only 60 years.

Reality sometimes looks something like this:

http://www.zmescience.com/science/biology/chimp-drone-plan-04092015/

Laird Baldwin, RIP

I got a phone call from Layo Baldwin on Friday night. I hadn't heard from Laird in a good while. Last I'd heard he and Layo had decided to move down to near Charlotte. He was going to wait for a liver transplant. Things had gotten worse, and it was time to deal with it. He'd had liver issues since he and I had renewed our long-term friendship back around 2000 or so. He was living in Florida then, but planning a move to Wytheville, VA. He'd taken up or been polishing banjo-playing, and one perk of Wytheville was, the joint was plumb full of banjos. I can't remember exactly how we re-connected, perhaps he wrote the Early Blurs website. At the time I was working on a CD with Libby, and also on a solo CD, all songs, no fiddling. A couple of years into our conversation he wrote this view of the solo disc and posted it on Amazon, where I was hawking the thing for a while:


BILL HICKS: THE PERFECT GIG (Admit One Records 1001, released April 2002)

"Kick Me, I'm a Tree!" 

That's what Marshall Hay, the guy that brought Jack Kerouac to Chapel Hill, N.C. back in '66, said  one night on his way back to his dorm after a few beers at "Harry's Bar and Grill". How did he meet  Kerouac? Marshall was hitch hiking. Kerouac was, well, on the road.  They met, paths converged. Marshall told Kerouac about the literary scene at Chapel Hill - how his fans would lay their drugs, booze and bodies at his feet, and the self-ravaged poet could not resist the flattery. So Jack Kerouac passed through a few of our lives shortly before he left the earth. 

Live in a bar/coffee house in Chapel Hill, about 35 years later, Bill Hicks recalls and invokes this visit in "Wet July" (track 6), in the same way that he ruminates over less significant events - some real, some  not - all authentic, in which (if you are good at reading between the lines) you can find little pearls of wisdom. Usually unspoken. Kind of like meditating on that old Zen Koan: "What is the sound of a solid iron flute, played upside down?" Answer: "Beanpaste that smells like beanpaste is no good."

This collection of songs (perhaps poems set to music is more correct) is not a pretty, slick piece of  Nashville packaging. It is neither for the faint of heart, nor the weak of will. You have to work hard  to pry out those oysters. But each is guaranteed to have a pearl. Not that I've been clever enough to  find them all... The upside to this is that you can listen to the songs over and over and over, as you slip into the warm nocturnal Southern breeze blowing through the Spanish Moss of Bill's brain. Or let your feet  play in the sandy beaches at Okrakoke, where Bill and his musician-wife Libby spend a lot of time  these days. Bill holds steadfastly to many of the ideals we all held so true back when I knew him at Chapel Hill in the sixties, the essence of which, I believe, can be summarized thusly: the journey is what It is all about. The question is the answer. And there are moments of vision in the most unexpected situations, (like "The SOB in the Carvel Truck" that passes him on the right and makes him swerve  into the twilight zone) that reveal a glimpse of the truth and beauty of our ephemeral lives, which is always right there under our noses, just out of reach, or maybe not.

There are a few tunes that are just pure fun like "Uncle Charlie's Revenge" and "Play 'Rocky Top'"  and others, that you just have to listen to again and again before they make much sense. His "dissertation on bars" ends with "Last Call", which, in my humble opinion, buggers all description. Here is the third verse, without the snakelike guitar accompaniment:

"So anyhow one night a drifter came in 
And swayed down the aisle in his long cowboy coat, 
His spurs making tiny Oooommmm-ish like notes, 
And the moon making sparkles on his buckles and irons, 
And he sat down beside me and ordered a brew. 
"How far is this engine takin' this rig?" 
I asked him--a kind of a "howdy" I guess-- 
And he looked at me gently, like Clint Eastwood would, 
And drew his revolver, gave the chambers a whack 
And said with a smile, 'It's a circular track.'"

Though Bill is one of my favorite old time fiddlers, no, my favorite (but don't tell that to whomever I'm playing [banjo] with these days), he plays strictly guitar on this album. His rhythm guitar work is quite amazing. Not only does he find the soul of each poem/song, he can cook that stuff up like gumbo. I had to email him to ask him if it was only one guitar. It is. As you approach this album keep in mind, this guy is a philosopher, a poet, and an artist. This is the  real Bill Hicks. He has dared to bare his soul. And, I think, it is his honesty and integrity that does  not want to make it too easy for the listener.
"Comparisons are odious", as a quote, is attributed in Bartlett's to Sir John Fortescue, who  apparently said it first, back in the 15th century. The important thing is not who said it first, but what  it means. In Bill's case it means it would be odious to compare his song/poems to anyone else's  writing, Kerouac notwithstanding, because of the unique quality of his art. 
[June 10, 2002, Reviewer: Laird Baldwin from New River Valley, Virginia]

I've never received a more wonderful review. A couple of years ago I contacted Laird in the hopes that he might help me produce a second CD--I've written a lot of songs since that first one, and I had home-recorded tracks of more than enough. I think I just burned out his ears though, and maybe that's one of the many ways times change. The project stalled, is still stalled. One o'these days maybe...

Through the years Laird and I talked a lot about music and politics. We pretty much agreed on everything, except the idea of voting for Nader in 2000 out of disgust with the other choices. I've talked about that here before. So anyways, it crossed my mind a few times that I should write Laird, see how the medical front was going, and that thought was sort of cancelled by the other one: he'll let me know, don't bother him right now.

So Layo called. Laird had died of heart failure last fall, waiting for that transplant. She apologized for not letting me know, but she'd been too devastated to try to find my address. I told her several times that mattered not at all, and I think that took ok. I'll miss his opinions on Trump, and on Hillary for that matter. These are very weird times in our politics, but then Laird rode the weird politics rails all his adult life.

We met in '65 or so, at UNC. He was the younger brother of a friend of mine, Stu Baldwin. He didn't like UNC much, though he was plenty smart. I remember the last time I saw him, back then. We'd walked down some tracks in Carrboro and found ourselves in a strange kind of clay-walled canyon, which is no doubt gone now given how Carrboro has been developed to the hilt in the subsequent 50 years. Laird was pondering his future. He wanted to drop out. He didn't want to end up in Vietnam. (I'd held on to my student deferment so tight the eagle was grinning, and ended up keeping it till I got a miraculously high draft number, making Vietnam a moot issue for me short of the black-pajama-ed hoards showing up east of the Appalachians.)

Laird opted for the Coast Guard. But then he'd raised his hand when some non-com asked for anyone interested in the field of medic. Laird's idea was, being a medic would be helping people. They shipped him straight to Lejeune and trained him with the leatherneck boys, bayonetting straw dummies, ready to take every hill in sight. He was going to Vietnam anyway. So Laird got on a bus and went to Canada. A lot of people who didn't want to go to Vietnam were doing that, but since he was in the military, it was a much more serious decision (see. e.g., Dick Cheney and his deferments). Laird ended up almost stateless, a man without a country. He got to Europe, where at some point he met Layo. And then Jimmy Carter finally ended this particular Vietnam chapter by pardoning the men who had done what Laird did, and Laird got to come home, with his wife.

All this happened since I'd seen him. So we talked back and forth on email, and met at a couple of fiddler's conventions back when he had a band, and he set up a nice gig for Libby and I in Wytheville, and he and Layo came down here to the cabin once to visit, where I made them my spectacular black bean chili rellenos.

Laird and I shared that other memory too. The time Jack Kerouac came to Chapel Hill. That was a neat thing. He was my corroboration. It really happened, that afternoon in the old Tempo Room, a basement bar full of writers and educated drunks. Later on it turned into some kind of dress shop, and Tom Banks had died of something or other, although Russ Banks did write his own account of the visit, and helped push Kerouac's car out of the ditch since the ditch was right in front of his salon. Laird and I retold the amazing story to each other, Marshall Hay hitching back to Chapel Hill, Kerouac picking him up! It was a different time, particularly if you ignored the sit-ins, as Kerouac did.

Layo is living for the present with their son, Arlo. She is thinking of moving back to Germany. It's strange and sad for her, to be in Wytheville, Va. I have no doubt of that.