Begin the Beguine

The night before Thanksgiving a channel on my dish setup was playing "swing classics," and I clicked it up since there was nothing at all I wanted to watch. This was one of the first plays--I ended up listening for several hours while I read things on the computer and Libby worked on the Thanksgiving dinner we were going to transport over to the old vet's the following day. I've found over many years of experience that it's probably wise to stay out of the kitchen when Libby's at work, unless she particularly wants me for some specific task. Otherwise, I just manage to scatter her momentum and something gets left out of the sauce, or added twice, since my default mode is to blurt out whatever pops into my mind as though that's how one conducts conversation. In the middle of a cooking process, however, it is simply not helpful for me to ask, "Hey, have you seen my black winter hooded coat lately?"

So here's what I heard instead:



This wasn't precisely what I heard, because the recording brought out the magnificent drum work better than this video, probably because live recording of drums in an open room is nearly impossible. Whatever. What a gorgeous arrangement! Happy Thanksgiving.

A Big Weekend

The band which we call the Law Firm set out from various points on Friday last to meet in Johnson City, TN and play a little show at a place that we helped open back in '76, the Down Home. It's a great acoustic music venue, a beer bar with decent food of a kind of mountain/Mexican variety. They've tuned their sound system over the decades to a place of near perfection--every instrument and voice is there, perfectly in the mix, on stage and off. We did a little sound check about 5:30, consumed our comped meal (enchiladas with beans and rice por moi), put on our stage shirts, cranked 'er up about 8:15 pm. It turned out that there were too many other things going on in Johnson City that night, and our audience was sparse, although a collection of genuine fans of the band assembled from far and wide, who deserved by their dedication the very tasty extended set private concert they received. It was a pleasure to play, and I got back to the Red Roof Inn in time to see the last inning of the Series Game of the day and savor a nice shot of Dewar's neat. We had an early start to look forward to, a great Shoney's breakfast buffet to get the day started, and a second show Saturday up near Galax, VA, at a beautiful music stage literally on the Blue Ridge Parkway.

That's me at the Down Home back in the summer, when we played their 40th anniversary show, sporting my new Kyle Busch Martinsville Sweep tee-shirt. He won both races back in April. Tom Watts has posted a bunch of neat photos of the Friday night gig over at Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10208936903193450&set=pcb.10208936913833716&type=3&theater

Up there on the Parkway the draw was much healthier, nearly a full auditorium. The sound was again terrific, a room engineered for acoustic properties, a built-in sound board, a good engineer, good mics. I could go on. The Down Home show was a perfect rehearsal. This is how you get better "on the road." So we played again, and set out for home about 8 pm, the last weekend of Daylight Savings, I met Libby in Graham, NC for the last little bit to our house in the woods, and I got to bed by midnight. Because we were to be up and on the road again for Martinsville, for Sunday's NASCAR race. Libby stayed up some later and finished up a birthday cake for our pals the Overholts. She'd already got together a cooler of waters and sodas and sandwiches, and we indeed made it up the road to the little Virginia mill town with the big time little track in time for the race.

This is our view. That's Danica in #10 passing in front of us. We sit in the first turn. At Martinsville, everything is pretty close and sometimes bits of grit blow off the track and into your eyes. The winner was Jimmie Johnson, who is Libby's favorite driver (and a good pick he is). By winning Sunday he has made it into the championship finals at Homestead, Florida, one of four drivers who will move into that final bracket by their finishes in the upcoming races. It's actually all pretty complicated, this championship "chase." You can look it up. It was a beautiful day in the autumn sun, nearly 80 degrees, and at times it's been more like 40 up there. We got back on the road in time to get back once again to our house and our cats and the woods, none the worse for wear, but pretty tuckered. The cats were glad to see us.

That's it for our adventures this year, unless something comes up. Libby and I had set up two contra dances to play this fall. The first was cancelled by Hurricane Matthew, which flooded the town where the dance was to be held. Then we booked another dance down on the coast, but the promoters decided there were too many conflicts that weekend to get a draw. Sometimes things do come up. I'll let you know.

In a week we'll find out who the new President will be. Susan Sarandon has announced she'll be voting for Stein. She can afford to pay the full ticket for any health care she needs, and can drive a car that runs on used french fry oil if she wants to bother. Her hands are clean and well manicured no doubt. For the rest of us, it seems to be a choice between a ruthless authoritarian with fascistic tendencies and a racist streak a mile wide, or a corrupt vulgarian couple one of whom has already been impeached, who assure us that she really loves children and always has. As I opined in last week's missive, I'm of the opinion that Mrs. Clinton needs as strong a popular victory as she can get in order to at least make the new impeachment rabble think a little while before they start wasting our tax monies on investigating the Clinton Foundation and how deals are really made in the big time. There will be an absolute din of howls for so-called bipartisanship, which will mean a further abdication of any efforts by a Clinton administration towards a greener and more just world. If Mrs. Clinton can halt efforts to destroy Social Security and Medicare, she will be a success even if she's ultimately impeached.

What sparking prospects await us in the new year. It must be gold, it's so shiny.

I Shall Be Released

Next week North Carolina finally starts early voting. I'm planning on voting the first day, assuming there are no tricky aspects, such as making early votes "provisional" or something. Our current state government adopted the national GOP strategy in place since Mr. Obama was first elected: oppose by any means necessary, obstruct by any available method, and in general suppress any voting blocks that might reasonably be predicted to vote Democratic. I intend, on that grounds alone, to do my tiny part to vote all of the rascals out. We're seeing at the moment polls which show our Republican Governor slightly behind the Democratic candidate, Roy Cooper, who is at present Attorney General. The Democrat running against incumbent senator Richard Burr is also leading. The appalling Trump campaign is surely not helping the NC GOP hopes, nor is the transparent manufacturing of phony wedge issues such as HB-2, which is costing the state economy millions and millions of dollars for no good reason at all. How many fearful parents of teen girls will breathe a sigh of relief that the public bathroom is "safe" from something or other as they stand in the reception line at a Trump rally with their daughter. The dissonance is so bad a pit stop on green is in order. Even Dana Perino yesterday called discretely for a barf bag. http://crooksandliars.com/2016/10/dana-perino-smacks-trump-surrogates-im

I watched a fine documentary biography of Howard Zinn last night. It reminded me of the longer view, something almost all media coverage ignores entirely these days. The basic truth is that relatively speaking, power in the US and the world is mostly in the hands of the vested. When good things do manage to happen with the aid of government, it is a breath of fresh air in a claustrophobic mine shaft. The Vietnam War was a project of both Democrats and Republicans, both Johnson and Nixon. Jimmy Carter was brought low by his naive support of the puppet prince of Iran, who had been installed with the aid of the CIA to thwart a perceived "leftist" but duly elected Iranian President. Bill Clinton sat by while the Rwanda genocide took place, possibly savoring a cigar dipped in the elixir of Monica, and Mrs. Clinton's ambition subjected the nation to Bill's randy itch, and indeed, subjects all of us to the whole queasy ferry crossing yet again this year, after she and her husband had been rejected by the country in 2008. The reason why Hillary Clinton's vote supporting George W. Bush's profoundly immoral war against Iraq is important is because it shows a deep lack of political and even moral courage on her part. It is yet another item in the list ad infinitum of the methodology of triangulation which is the hallmark, start to finish, of Clintonian politics. There are many speculations that Trump was goaded to run by the Clintons in the first place, as being the most easily defeated Republican. There is no doubt that whole cable networks cleared the decks for the Clintons during this election season: hey, I'm talking to you, MSNBC. But most of Trump's problems are in the end the result of Trump himself, and his shocking incompetence obviously translates on the presidential stage to an utter inability to do diplomacy at every level: in his own party, with Democrats, or with the family of nations. As President, Mr. Trump's tendency to self-destruction becomes a tendency that affects all of us and the life of the United States. There might well be no opportunity to repair the kind of damage Mr. Trump might initiate. We have a system of either A or B. Picking the unicorn is a fantasy, and the argument that the better Clinton does in the popular vote can matter is a significant argument in a situation where the Trump side is already claiming that the whole system is "rigged."

The bottom line remains what it is. Mr. Trump is so grandly unqualified that a vote for him is a leap into the abyss. His remarkable percentage of supporters, given the appalling litany of his own campaign oratory, is a testimony to the psychology of hate and brand loyalty worthy of scholarly treatises, which will surely follow his defeat in November. I read today that even the sad, brainwashed students at Liberty Bible College in Lynchburg, VA, are rejecting their college president's call to vote Trump or risk eternal damnation. Perhaps I should revise my ideas about Liberty University: they must be teaching some good thinking habits up there.

I want to just get 'er done! The Nationals lost, a wonderful team I grew very fond of over the past season. I'm hopeful that the team owners will leave everything in place, including their great manager. The 5th game was lost on the field. Daniel Murphy was at the plate. He popped up. End of story. Time to rent some more movies, and watch the fall progress. The hurricane forced the Greenville, NC dance we were to play today to be cancelled. Too many roads flooded. But as one door closed another opened, and Libby and I are now set to play a dance in Morehead City on December 3. By then the waters will surely have receded to their more typical levels.

Onward and Upwards with the Arts. Don't drive through the flood waters.

[Photo from WRAL.com, of Highway 58 in Nashville, NC. We used to stop in Nashville to pick up some barbeque on the way to see the old vet in Tarboro, just downstream on the mighty Tar River.]

Mid-1950s, Ralston

Yesterday Libby and I embarked into the NC coastal plain to play a dance in New Bern, a beautiful old town on the Trent River, which once was the capital of colonial North Carolina and boasts a big house called Tryon's Palace, where the colonial governor resided at the time of the Revolution. The building burned at some point, and was restored on its original foundation in the 1950s. It was probably shortly after its restoration that my dad drove the family by the place, stopped and looked briefly at the front door, and kept going where ever we were going at the moment. I expect my mother had talked up such a visit in advance. We might have been at a big barbeque event in Kinston involving in some way the Danforth Foundation, which was part of Ralston-Purina, a big feed company based in Missouri which had given a good bit of money to N.C. State, where my dad taught. Indeed, for a time, during this period of my childhood, dad was intensely loyal to a hot breakfast cereal called "Ralston," which we ate nearly every morning at his behest until one day some weeks into the regime he suddenly grew very tired of the stuff and gruffly banished it, speaking harshly to my mother about the matter and causing my sister and I to raise our eyebrows at each other while he was otherwise occupied. Never again have I tasted Ralson, but my sis and I still take note of the incident at family meals.

Libby and I decided that renting a car was a good plan for this excursion, and found a very comfy Dodge Dart in Apex at the rental place, and easily managed to fit the keyboard and our instruments and miscellaneous gear in the trunk and back seat (hey, those drop down rear seats are a fine idea for musicians on the fly). We switched over and left the brave little Toyota Tacoma with 250 K and counting in the parking lot, with reassurances that we'd return, same as we'd told the cats earlier, and we were off to New Bern. Ms Garmin got us safely through the Raleigh labyrinth and out onto US 70 East. Half way down, now on the upper coastal plain, we came to Goldsboro and although the roads had somewhat changed since our last trip, we found at the east end of town "Wilbur's," which is as good a barbeque joint as exists in North Carolina. We both chose the barbequed chicken, having many years ago agreed that there was none better. The Dart got us on down to New Bern with plenty of time to set up, and as a bonus a great parking place just across the street from the venue, which was on Middle Street, not far at all from the Palace itself.

All the stuff worked, and we got the piano and fiddle balanced in the speakers as people drifted in. This was part of a good sized folk music festival being tossed by the Down East Folkarts Society. We'd played a dance for them some years back. Great folks. They'd hoped we could come down Friday night and catch our old bandmates Unknown Tongues Cajun-Zydeco, but sadly the cats forbade that extravagance. Anyways, just as we were setting up a man with a little white goatee and a twinkle came up and asked if he could film some of the dance for his local access tv show, which is called "Billy and Sandra Stinson's Folk Seen," and we said sure, why not. He worked unobtrusively while we got the first dance going. Somewhere in there I had an old flash of memory.

I lived on Vanderbilt Avenue in Raleigh, just across from the NC State campus where my dad taught. Vanderbilt ran into Horne Street, and just north of where it intersected was a yellow-brick house wherein lived a short little blond kid named Billy Stinson, who could possibly have grown into this photographer. I called him over at the break between dances and damn if he wasn't the very same guy! We'd not seen nor heard of each other in sixty odd years, but back then I'm pretty sure I had appeared with him and some other guy in a little Kingston-Trio type of combo, on a local afternoon TV show, where we performed "They Call the Wind Mariah" with me on bongos. My first band, if you don't count the school orchestras I was in.

Billy and I recalled a few things in common, such as climbing up on the old Man-Mur Bowling Alley roof from my back yard--a vast tarred expanse that was like a weird desert. Later on that building burned down and all the neighbors sprayed their garages with water to keep them from catching, and the next day the building was a ruin, with twisted I-beams and smoking floors. The bowling balls somehow survived. I still have one somewhere, or at least kept it for decades.

Billy has his own story of course. Here's some of it:

https://www.ourstate.com/stinsons-ranch/

And more:

https://www.facebook.com/BillyAndSandraStinson/

He and Sandra describe their music as related to the work of the Kingston Trio, thus corroborating my flickering memories. The dance was excellent, and wrapped up at about 6:30 PM, and we repacked the Dart and headed back up the road, getting back home to the slightly worried kitties just in time to see the last half of the Carolina/Providence game. Carolina won, and make it today to the "Sweet Sixteen." Libby and I have ridden many a night with the Heels on the radio, cheering them on. It was all in all a sweet day together. Today spring has arrived with rain and chill, and there's a late fire in the stove, and little green shoots on the dogwoods. Two more weeks on my job and the business folds, a casualty of depressed scrap steel prices, resulting low product, and perhaps the fact that the owners are my age and now see retirement as a possible happy adventure. We all, employees and employers alike, push off into the pond week after next, April Fool's being the last day, and no joke about it. The next day is the NCAA semi-finals. Hopefully the Heels will be there.

Come to think of it, if it was 1957 that I made my teevee debut, what goes around comes around. That was the year Frank McGuire and some skinny kids from New York took the Heels to the NCAA finals, where they beat Wilt Chamberlain and the Jayhawks and went 32-0. If we make it past Indiana and the rest of the gauntlet, the Jayhawks are what we're aiming for this time around too.

Update: Kansas lost a week after I wrote this, and UNC faces Syracuse in the semi-finals.

Wrestle Mania

Here's the "explanation" for Trump, at least if you are wondering about his evident success in whatever it might be called that is happening prior to the advent of actual voting:

http://www.chaunceydevega.com/2015/08/politics-is-professional-wrestling.html

Working backwards. We can see the evident fact that professional wrestling is universally popular amongst many bodies of people. Not everyone likes it of course. My guess would be that mostly the highly educated peripatetic readers among us find wrestling to be overly obvious and therefore boring. Most of these folks probably have never thought it worth the bother to even try to understand the forms of the "sport." I include myself. My dad was an amateur wrestler and coached wrestling at NC State in the '30s before he founded the Philosophy and Religion Department there. He was disgusted by professional wrestling because it was "fake." He knew real from fake wrestling, as he would often show me as a child by putting me into a half-Nelson and immediately pressing me to the living room rug, utterly defeated. I learned early on to despise professional wrestling, and even now simply admit that there is a kind of formal drama to the "sport", whilst at the same time maintaining my intellectual integrity by using the scare quotes consistently.

But if we want to understand what's going on in the forever blooming buzzing confusion, we must admit that the American democratic process is in many ways like a great sea, with tides, schools of fish, even leviathans on the occasion. Our election process is not primarily about sensible folks in togas considering at length the sensibility of various agendas, and then choosing accordingly. At the booth we'll now and then see a toga-clad figure, but mostly it'll be something else entirely. Obviously Mr. Trump understands what he's doing.

Meanwhile, the other big question is Bernie or Hillary. Here's a good post on that:

http://yastreblyansky.blogspot.com/2016/01/you-say-you-want-revolution-but-what-if.html

Among many terrific points, here's Yastreblyansky quoting Eric Loomis (from LGM blog):

I don’t believe that Sanders can create a political revolution. In fact, I think there is essentially no chance of it. It seems that Sanders supporters think there is going to be a wave of left-populist candidates swept into office with him. But where are those candidates in current House races? Where are the open Bernie acolytes either challenging moderate Democrats in primaries or running in conservative House districts that are heavily gerrymandered? Because while there are probably a few, I sure don’t see some broader platform of leftist candidates here, nor has anyone told me how they are going to win a 60-40 Romney seat.

Everyone who's not a wrestling fan wants to embrace their best values in the politics of America. That's what a vote for Mr. Sanders comes down to. Hillary Clinton has too damn much baggage, too much history, too much compromise. She stuck with Bill, and she voted (sorta) "for Iraq." We all want to walk into a better situation, a better future (those of us who aren't wrestling fans). But there's this. On June 3, 1944,Ike knew he was shaking the hands of nice young men whom he was sending to their deaths.

Meanwhile, it seems to me that the whole "mainstream media" has now capitulated to the spectacle. News is entertainment. They can cover that just as well as anything else, and get more viewers, and thus sell more ads. Or, as my dad remarked long long ago, there's not much amateur wrestling on the television.

Garbage In, Garbage Out

From Digby this morning:

...Thomas Sowell, who in 2007 wrote in National Review: “When I see the worsening degeneracy in our politicians, our media, our educators, and our intelligentsia, I can’t help wondering if the day may yet come when the only thing that can save this country is a military coup.”

In the “Against Trump” symposium, Sowell makes this outlandish comparison: “The actual track record of crowd pleasers, whether Juan Perón in Argentina, Obama in America, or Hitler in Germany, is very sobering, if not painfully depressing.” Is there any rhetorical overkill Trump has been guilty of that is worse than this?

Sowell’s belief that a coup could be good for America and that Obama can be fairly compared to Hitler gives lie to the argument, made repeatedly by writers in the National Review symposium, that Trump is not a true conservative. For there is very little that Trump has said or done that can’t find prior sanction in National Review, be it racism, anti-immigrant nativism, or sexism. In the last debate, in response to an attack on his “New York values,” Trump noted that conservatives do come from New York and cited William F. Buckley. It is fair to see Trump’s version of white identity politics as firmly in the tradition of Buckley and his magazine.

Go back in the time machine (Youtube) and watch Buckley debating James Baldwin. QED.

________________________

Here in the Chatham County woods, there's a hard crusty snow on the ground you can walk on top of. I got one vehicle up the hill and pointed towards the paved road yesterday morning. It took two tries! The trick with the old S-10 (the truck of choice, picked because I'd just changed the oil and filled her up, and as opposed to the old Toyota Tacoma, or the ancient F-150), is to shift into 2nd as you start climbing. Usually that keeps the revvs within reason on the tach, and spares the tires, and you don't simply stall half way up, spinning for nothing and no chicks in sight. I was still spinning pretty good, but I made it to the flat at the top of the hill, then over the top and pointed down hill. The road, at 8 AM, was white. If we get out to the cat food store tomorrow I'll be kinda surprised. It'll depend on some significant warming. These are the days, now and again, when the idea of something with four-wheel drive makes fantastic sense. The other 352 days a year, not so much. So the years pass, the trucks get older, the new trucks meanwhile getting up to a stratosphere beyond a modest family Mercedes Benz, according at least to the current vehicle ads from Detroit with their complex offers of 20% off if you act now. Like the guy sitting on the nail keg at the Silk Hope store said, you could buy a house. So a lot more folks are sleeping in their cars these days. There's a logic.

We're good on our firewood, but there's a ways to go till the end of this. I'm keeping the saw warm inside. The chain is sharp. I guess that's the next project. We were lucky as we didn't lose power. For some reason we stayed just on the cold side, and it sleeted and snowed, but I never saw freezing rain or any build up of ice on the trees. Losing power in the country sucks. It means shortly you have no water. There are other things of course, but no water is the worst in short order. I filled the kettle yesterday, and ground up one extra grinder of coffee. We have a lot of water containers filled up. Most likely we would have endured till the lights flickered back on, and of course they still might go, although I'm thinking that at 11 am Saturday morning we might have escaped that feature of the blizzard. Hopefully the folks in the cities are hanging in there.

I did happen to notice, on my morning walk to the firewood stack, that the light had gone out in the pump house. I'm still not sure why that happened, but it took switching out the light fixture and several bulbs before it came back to life. Also took some wet knees, and more melting snow on the floor than I'd like, though the wood stove will have the puddles evaporating. Country dehumidification I guess.

The photo comes from the WRAL website. They invite viewers to send in pics. The houdahenians all gathered in front of the slider to watch similar sparrows scratching for food in the leaves as it snowed yesterday. Cat TV.

_____________________________

Between Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Sanders, I'll take the Democrat who wins the primaries. If the American voters can't see what's happened to the other party, it's blind leading the blind, and I guess we'll all march over the cliff. Digby has a number of good posts about the horror of this campaign season, if you were interested at all in the Republican choice. Driftglass has been clear-eyed for decades. The country has lost, for the most part, a "mainstream" media willing to tell political truth, somebody on some channel who could say "wait a minute, that's out and out fascism." Decades back, Murdoch crafted a counter-weight to approximate truth, and the right more generally has been doing that in various venues, be it science, law, or even simple fairness.

We are nonetheless moving inexorably towards February, and the days are growing longer. Might be the year to plant some taters and turnips and all the rest.

____________________________

Then there's this, from the blog Balkanization:

http://balkin.blogspot.com/2016/01/is-ted-cruz-naturalized-citizen.html

Of course Cruz has aimed to deflect Trump's questioning of his legal status re becoming President as just more partisan politics. But as you can see in this brief post from the balkin blog, there are precedents to the issue stretching back to times when Cruz wasn't yet born. Briefly, his status as a naturalized American citizen is a problem. Legally, and with precedents. Cruz, when he confidently brushes aside these issues as being somehow "settled," merely illustrates his ability to lie with the best of 'em.

Falling Towards the New Year

We did make it through Christmas, and actually it was an excellent Christmas, with all the food and good cheer amongst our dwindling band, up in Greensboro. Work ended on a somewhat frantic note. We had a hurricane style rain on Wednesday last, which attacked our already battered driveway. Libby was aiming to head out and get a lot of supplies for her part of the Christmas cooking, but found herself instead bogged down in the driveway just as the serious upturn begins, where everything had turned either soft or deeply scoured. Usually we get stuck at this spot when there's a snow, not because of mere rain. So I took off early and got the mail and an extra large bag of cat food just in case, and got back home to find the Toyota just as she had described, and that's where I left it in the gloming, no reason to try to back up through the squish and hope I don't find the edge where a tree resides, wait till Christmas Eve. I did leave my truck out at the road side of the hill, so if we had to walk in and out we'd at least have some transportation once we got there.

The rains subsided some during the night. The local tv weather was dire, with flood warnings everywhere including where we needed to go. Christmas Eve arrived however, with just murk above and below, and no roar on the tin roof. Eventually Libby decided to venture out, and I backed the Toyota to a turn around I could see and drove to the house, so we were ready to pack things for Christmas Day assuming we could by then drive all the way to the road. Carrying Christmas out was in any event little better than heart attack territory, way too much stuff. When it snows and we're in such a fix, we've used a sled. No chance when it's mud and rocks. Either we'd go up to Greensboro empty, or we'd drive out. Libby went to Burlington to do the shopping she was aiming to do the day before. The clouds were so bad the Dish couldn't see the sat. That's pretty bad, particularly with no actual rain falling. I watched the Big Sleep again to pass the time. I hadn't recalled the pretty cabbie who helps Marlow follow that cab, and tells him to call her anytime but preferably in the evening, when she's not working. It was nice to think again of Doghouse Riley, an inspiration to all who try to keep a finger hold on the precipice.

It all worked out and we made Christmas, and while Libby did late night cooking we even finished up the tree.

You can see to the left the little Hindu shrine we built to the Houdahenians, which some of the more pragmatic would recognize as a fountain waterer. They've enjoyed the tree, and have grown mature enough to understand that climbing into the tree is a fool's errand. We avoided the glass ornaments as we have plenty of non-breakable ones, including crocheted snowflakes from long ago, and a little picture under glass of the kid as a baby, her first Christmas tree behind her, which was long ago as well.

After we got back from Greensboro in one piece, and with the company of a gorgeous full moon and clear if fleeting skies, we enjoyed the last of the day at home, and no need of a fire either, as it's been close to 80 and we even got out one of the fans that get put away when October arrives. In the morning I got to the post office, where I found presents from the kid and her hubby, which we opened in front of the tree once the lights were turned on. Day after Christmas we also opened a normally closed passage--a window, actually, that is now just an opening from the bedroom into the upstairs of the cabin. This was Libby's surprise gift to the kitties, a new route around the house, and it was enjoyed more than anything else we gave them aside perhaps from the little feather birds which they tried to eat whole, causing enough concern for me to "put them up," as parents say often after Christmas. Since the window was opened, all of them have spent a lot of time coming in and out in one direction or the other. After we retire at night we hear in the deep dark the startling "plop" of one of them, jumping off a shelf and onto the loft floor beside the bed.

Yesterday, the last of the Holiday for me, my old friend Mike, who taught philosophy and then went into grading work, came out to study the driveway situation with us, and offered proposals and suggestions which I think we'll probably take up pretty shortly. The dreadful storm--they've named it Goliath--devastating New Mexico and Texas seems mostly aimed a bit further north and we're hoping it doesn't decide to give us yet another hammering. The driveway isn't cut, but if that were to happen we'd be in a real fix. For now we'll fill ruts with bigger rocks and perhaps some Quikcrete patches. We're almost to a New Year. The general agreement is that 2015 was pretty awful. The Dish did come back on. Now it's time to go back to work.

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.

Best Fireworks Today

I looked out the window this morning down to the east, where there's a field and then woods, and at the top a little garden spot that Libby has flowers growing in. Last summer I'd driven a tall pipe into the fence line of that garden so as to hang a flower basket on it, as back here in the woods there's never quite enough light for those flower baskets they sell at the grocery store when spring is upon us to thrive. So on top of that post today was a big red-tailed hawk. I'd seen him flash away a few times before this year, when I was walking out to the truck. He (or she) is always well on the wing before I ever think to look up, so although I've thought I was seeing a hawk, it might have I thought been one of the owls that also frequent the woods here. This is most definitely a hawk. I hope the hawk can coexist ok with the owls. There's plenty of squirrel stew for all, plus snakes (I see from looking at google that hawks seem to love snakes, including copperheads), mice, voles, rabbits. Have at it, boys. The cats live inside, they can watch the adventure.

Last time I saw a red-tail this close was way back when I had some bantam chickens for pets. I did eat the eggs. I had a small variety, including a couple of Cornish, who looked a little like a red tail. One day I was splitting wood in the yard, and the chickens were out ranging as they did, and I noticed there was an extra chicken! A red-tail had landed amongst the flock, possibly one of the bantams had just jumped aside at the last second. Chickens are always scanning the sky above them for danger. I hollered at the hawk and he reluctantly flew up to a branch. He gave up and went on since I didn't leave. The chickens survived that day, although they didn't really thrive out here. Too many predators, and too little attention from me. Libby planted some flowers they tore up too--that didn't put them in her good graces. It was one of those things: you moved out to the country and you tried to live like your grammaw did, without really having a clue of why grammaw's chickens were always a thriving flock. (Hint, she was always there, there was a good yard dog.) Grammaw did give me a good anatomy lesson concerning chickens one Saturday or Sunday. We'd eat one of those chickens on Sundays. She killed it privately, plucked it, then laid it out on the kitchen table and showed me what was inside. The craw was full of corn she'd fed the chickens that morning. She cut it open and put the corn aside. Later she tossed the corn back out on the ground, for the chickens. The ground was bare. There were no ticks.

I'm not going to spend much more time on poor Ben Jones. He's making the rounds of the Fox morning shows now. A friend of mine sent me a link of Ben and Steve Doucey talking flag, and how the Dukes of Hazzard was actually the greatest blow for freedom and humanity since Wonder discovered the formula for white bread written by a finger of flame on the very walls of Plato's cave. I'd imagine someone in the Hazzard cast might have sent Ben a note by now. "Will you please STFU!" If they've taken the show down from whatever cable network was running it, it's likely because Ben has made such a huge noise that they've had to. Who was paying attention before Ben? Dukes of Hazzard was ubiquitous on the endless list of shows you have to pay for to get the tiny number of channels you want to watch. If it was listed in a block of time I was scrolling through, it was a certainty that I was not going to click there. I have no problem with it's existence, and it will exist. So will Mayberry, and Amos 'n' Andy. It's the fodder of bored Saturday mornings, particularly in the drear winter, the tv in the living room, the endless laugh track, the little round heads sitting in front of it, silhouettes against the flickering, the house smelling of washing clothes, washing dishes, baking bread or boiling cabbage. We will not manage to erase history, nor should we. All we need to do is develop a more accurate knowledge of our history, of what the flag stands for, of where it shouldn't out of decency ever be seen. If NASCAR can really make banning it stick, a great step in this direction will have been made.

The Dukes are a clueless bunch. That's their humor, such as it is. The show needed Mr. T for balance. "Take a right, Fool. Don't drive through that feed store."

Up 'N Back

We set right out from Jim's about 9 AM Friday last, packin' up a durn good load, aiming to get up to Newark, Del, home of the Blue Hens, in plenty of time for our Friday night concert for the Brandywine Folk Society. The Google said it would be a cinch, but we did know that there was DC sitting fat in the way. There'd been a time when you could take the 295 shortcut through Anacostia and brave the broken concrete as a fine trade-off for actual progress. This time the smart phone Joe was operating said take 495 east, but by then it was already stop and go, and the phone would tend to tell us alts just after the exit had passed, or whilst we were in the far left with no way to get over. Sometime after the Baltimore Tunnel we finally started moving at highway speed again, and paid the $8.00 toll gladly to escape the molasses.

It turned out we got to Newark in decent time, and didn't have to just sit around and wait for a building to open.

The show started after it got dark, and the house was nicely full, including a former '70s Chapel Hill vet ("I worked at the Record Bar," she said, grinning) who asked for "Give Me the Roses," and someone else who called for "Hobo's Last Letter," both numbers from earlier times which we hadn't done in a good while. We did 'em, and well I thought. (I ought to write a sequel before it's too late: "Hobbs' Last Letter," for the British philosophers in our midst.) We had a spectacularly capable sound guy too, and he put one of the best mics I've ever played into on my fiddle. It was an auspicious start to the journey. The fancy mic had a green wind screen which matched my bow stick, and my bandana (see the vid, below). The stars were aligned. There were encores, and after we got the van packed up we headed out up I-95 for Wilmington and Philly and Rafe Stefanini's wonderful cottage on the hills just west of the city proper.

I was riding in the back, Jim driving, Joe running the navigation equipment, which was a nice female voice telling us to take lefts and rights and such as we passed through the gigantic urban complexity that is the Wilmington-Philly nexus. There was much to see as we whizzed along, and I wished I had a movie camera, like Frederico Fellini in his marvelous "Roma," which I watched again last night just to remind myself of the trip through our first Nation's Capital. There was, at one point, even a huge wreck to observe, fortunately on the far side of the turnpike and separated from us by concrete barriers, but including police, ambulances, and a very big traffic jam. We also went past the beautiful "boat houses" along the Deleware, lit as though it were still Christmas, and past the big skyscrapers of the city center, then through a dark tough-ass section of mean streets sprinkled with quickly parked police cars with their blue lights spinning. I was thinking at this point that I did hope Rafe didn't live just here, but we kept on rolling and were soon climbing up out of the city and into yarded houses, and eventually and a few miles later we were turning into Rafe's driveway, a tricky left turn just below the brow of a hill crest that must be an adventure every time. The porch light was on.

Rafe was waiting up and escorted us in. I'd heard much of him, but never met him. Joe is in a band with him, and Jim knows everyone in the music world. We went into his kitchen and I looked around, somewhat dazed. We were all very tired from the long day. I picked the cot set up in his living room, discretely privatized by a nice Japanese screen set just past the passage from the hall, and quickly set about crashing once I'd brushed my teeth. Here is where I slept: Rafe and his daughter are in this photo playing music and the cot is stowed away. The two of them have a good CD available, by the way. She was in Nashville at the time of our visit and sending her dad frequent notes about life in Music City.

Saturday morning arrived with bright blue skies and temps in the high 50s. The pollen that had appeared down here in NC was a month back up there--the backwards procession of seasons was obvious as we drove along the interstate. In Philly the Forsythia was hinting at a spring to come, and the pollen was blessedly absent. Pennsylvania ought to argue with New Hampshire for the sobriquet "granite state." They gots the rocks. Just across from Rafe's house was this absolutely first class stone wall. I seem to have quit the stone-mason's ways for good, but I still notice good rock work:

Inside Rafe's foyer was his extensive boot collection. He displays them because, he said, "they're actually uncomfortable."

We all just hung out in the morning, which means these days checking your messages. I let Libby know we'd made it to Saturday. After a while it got to be lunch time, and Rafe directed us to one of the things cities just have over the countryside--interesting restaurants. We went to a Korean place named "More Food." It's a really wonderful place, as big as a supermarket, with pictures of a huge number of dishes on the walls and organized according to inscrutable Korean principles (one area was called "Ming," another "Fuze," and then there were two or three in phonetic Korean). You ordered by number and paid a cashier, then waited for your number to appear in lights over a window centered in an array of pictures of dishes. The service was fast, and we were hungry. The food was fantastic too. What a delight. The place was probably ten minutes from Rafe's house. Can't beat that. There's nothing within an hour of my hobbit hole that comes close. After we finished up and bussed our dishes we went downstairs and looked at the shops of various mostly Asian packaged foods and fresh fruits and vegetables. There was a poster still up from an event that had happened the week before, a Korean hip hop festival apparently:

When we got back to the house Rafe looked up Honey Cocaine on the google. That's her in the center circle. She's got a fine resume, and people will pay $50 to "meet and greet." Not bad. I hope she rides the great swell of stardom a long time, and never gets a splash. We took long naps after we got back, then it was time to go to our gig, just a few towns over through the endless suburban streets. We went through Jenkintown both ways. It was a house concert, with very nice appointments. The stage looked like this:

It was a small room with great acoustics and we played around one mic, with Mr. Craver having his own Shure 58 workhorse over by his keys. Again, great audience, fun night. As we were so well rested and fed, we seemed to over all play better, although I managed to stomp all over Craver's break in "Play 'Rocky Top.'" I've always liked a meta song; we did this one back in the day, when we were in the band we were in in the '70s. It sort of drifted away, although I worked on reviving it when I was writing a lot of songs and going out and doing solo songwriter shows, about fifteen years ago. Last summer the band revived it, with a new arrangement, and it's gotten rather snappy. Here's what it sounded like during one of it's first revival moments, but it's tighter and better now:



After we licked up the bits of cheese and bread left by the audience, and packed up the instruments, we made the late night way back through Jenkintown to Rafe's. I told him it made me some nervous to play a Tommy Jarrell tune in front of someone who'd studied Tommy more intensely than I had. We laughed, and Rafe reminded me of something about Jarrell's "Sally Ann" (which we tend to close the show with) which I'd pretty much forgotten. There once was a low 4th part! At the moment I just agreed, thinking that what I play these days, namely the first or high part played an octave lower, was more or less what he was referring to. But in the middle of the past week, as I sat at my station at the truck scale during a hitch of emptiness between customers, I recalled exactly that low part, a quite different thing, how it goes, how at the end of it there's even a kind of pause, before the whole symphony restarts at the top. I don't know why I've dropped that out. I expect there was a reason, partly that I've given up long ago playing in cross-tuning with the G string tuned up to A for tunes in the key of D--Tommy Jarrell's way of playing such tunes. Having that open string low note makes that low part, which is little more than a scale, very easy to play at speed. And then there's that hitch at the end. Whatever, Rafe was right. There's a missing part in my "rendition." Good thing I don't claim to be reproducing the Jarrell repertoire, just playing tunes I "got" from him long ago.

When we got back to Rafe's it was mighty easy to hit the hay, and the boys couldn't even tempt me with a short glass of Jamison's. Soon it was Sunday morning. Absolutely divine fresh bagels and perfect feather-thin Nova Lox arrived. My gawd, the city life! Then we were on the PA Turnpike to Harrisburg and our last gig, at the Abbey Pub and Restaurant.

Harrisburg's a lot like Durham, but without jobs. Here's what the street looked like on a bright Sunday afternoon:

The pub itself is a block further, out of view. The stage is on the second floor, but there was a lift and we got our gear up there without much groaning. The sound engineer, a guy named Chili, was very good although used to doing bands with plugged in instruments. He had some trepidation about all our open mics, and the risks of unexpected whistles mid-song. We had plenty of time to get the sound system wrung out, and he and I even sat at the bar and watched some of the Masters' final round and talked about the scrap metal world a bit. "I do some scrapping when it's tight," he said. The audience drifted in, and eventually filled up the space very well, and there were several old friends I hadn't seen in a long time, from the Augusta teaching days.

I thought our sets in Harrisburg were the best we did, and we nailed Play Rocky--I remembered to shut up and let Mike take the chorus break like we have planned it, before jumping in on the last verse. To top off the whole evening, we had a great meal down below at the pub's restaurant, and drove out to the edge of town with the Susquehanna Folk Society's President and spent the night in her beautiful expanded log cabin, which was a lot like here in my log place. Then it was Monday morning and off to North Carolina.

The trip up, with it's several hour traffic jam, made choosing I-81 an easy decision. Then Jim topped the plan by discovering to the rest of us his secret passageway over to Rt. 29, across Afton mountain, a mere 15 or so miles (just enough) of beautiful mountain roads and switchbacks, then back onto the 4 lanes of 29, as usual not heavily traveled, and we whizzed down through Lynchburg and the Falwell Empire, and Concrete World, and on to Danville and NC 86, and were home to Jim's by about 5, and I got on out here by 6 or so, after hosing off the incredible layer of pollen on the Toyota, Jim living in the midst of huge pine trees that apparently spent our weekend away in utter sexual frenzy.

I can't say I really want to go back to life on the road. It was great to get home, and I enjoyed work this past week a little more than usual. But as a once-in-a-while thing, our modest tours are pretty great. The food alone, this trip, was worth the effort. We also met some really great folks, and discovered we still have an audience out there.

Fiddling Weekend

Me and the boys are heading out for points NE for some musical stuff, starting in a few minutes. I'll try to have something great to write about next week. Maybe even a pic. Our web gal has also called for pics and descriptions. "It wasn't too bad for a bunch of geezers" will surely work. We'll go up the ladder from there.

Meanwhile, Digby has a fine post about Tucker Carlson's amazing ability to lie to himself. Here's the link:

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2015/04/tucker-carlson-is-very-very-confused.html

You'd think a grown up person with a journalistic job and a long history in the field would be able to avoid the ridiculous mistake of calling the email simply an "accident." What's accidental about the email? I've never sent an accidental email in my life--it's about as intentional an activity as it gets. I guess you can accidentally hit the "send all" button. But no one is complaining about that accident. They are complaining about the content, which is intentional, and which not only Buckley but Tucker now owns via his pathetic defense.

It's just what they do, so ingrained that they don't even know anymore when the old defenses kick in.

Onwards and upwards with the arts.

Meet Me at the 18th St./ Lexington Avenue Station

I rode the subway a lot whenever I was in New York City. First time was in the mid-'50s, when I went up there as a guest of my buddy Bob Richardson's family. We rode the Lakawanna ferry across from New Jersey. The Richardsons had relatives in South Orange I think it was. One afternoon, while we were sitting around the South Orange house, they ordered one of the best deli sandwiches I ever had--still!--what they called in that part of New Jersey the "sloppy Joe." Anyways, we took that ferry over, and got on the subway and rode down to the Bowery stop, and walked Bowery and Canal looking for interesting industrial stuff that Mr. Richardson might want to buy. That was the first time I'd ever seen a falling down drunk homeless person. If any such persons lived in Raleigh I guess they might have been found in the park downtown.

Everytime I got to New York City I took the subway. When I was in the 10th Grade I went up there on the train with my journalism class. We went to a couple of plays, including Raisin in the Sun, and Carol Burnett's Once Upon a Mattress. I'd find bits of time to explore, and rode the train down to 14th Street from the Times Square hotel where we all stayed, where I had the good fortune to see Miles Davis playing in a little club. Another time, maybe I was in college by then, I went up for a few days with my friend Neal Jackson and we toured various spots in the Village, again riding the subway. In 1964 I hitchhiked up there mid-summer and stayed for nearly a month with a painter, Harold Bass, who'd been living in Chapel Hill. He lived down on 3rd Street, between B and C, with his girlfriend, in an old-timey tenement with a bath tub in the kitchen that served with its removable metal top as the kitchen food prep space. I slept on a couch in the living room and wandered the streets by foot and subway. I began to notice how beautiful the tiling was on the BMT line. I learned how to ride for entertainment, and understood the subway maps, and how you could simply ride as long as you wanted, transferring, going to the end and walking across to go back, seeing at least the underside of all the boroughs, noticing all the mysterious names: Myrtle Avenue, DeKalb, Far Rockaway, Chambers, Van Cortlandt.

When I was in Diamond Studs, in 1975, I had the chance to actually live productively in Manhattan for much of that year. I'd ride the train from where I lived, an apartment on 95th between 8th and 9th, down to the theatre, on 43rd. I'd take the IRT Seventh Avenue line. We did eight shows a week, with Monday off. That turned me into a professional performing musician. On Mondays I'd take the train different places, go to museums, just look at stuff. I wish I'd brought a camera. There was some graffiti in those days, but it didn't seem as insane as it's become since. I never felt afraid in the city. I had some street smarts about how to walk and where not to go. I was surely lucky too. Later on, when the Ramblers were doing occasional New York City gig stops, one of our band was mugged up on 110th street when a guy followed him and his girl friend (who lived there) into their building, then held them up and took all of his money. We were playing that night at the South Street Seaport Pier venue--a great summer gig we did several times. Jim showed up very bummed and broke. We'd divided up our money before coming into the City so we'd have some spending money. I think that's when Jim pretty much gave up on New York City.

The next big trip to New York was with Libby. We went up there on the way to Maine and visited one of my fiddle students and his family at their Brooklyn apartment. They had a son who was an early teen, and he knew the trains as only a kid growing up in the City can. We toured around the place with him as a guide one day, including walking through the plaza of the World Trade Centers, and a quick trip through the Met (shades of Godard's Band of Outsiders). Since that trip I've not been back. I miss the place. But it might be the place that I remember. Hard to say.

There's a whole lot of stuff on line about abandoned subway stations. The first link I hit had a picture of the abandoned 18th Street station. That resonated with a memory, of seeing the 18th Street station go past riding in an express train. At first I thought that was really an interesting thing, that in fact I could never have gotten off at that station, express or local. It was just sitting there, in view but not accessable. Then I realized after more reading that actually the 18th Street station I remembered was the one on the 7 train, on the west side, which was still open. I rarely rode the Lexington Avenue train, so I doubt I ever saw that ghost east side station, closed since the '40s.

This is what the 18th Street/Seventh Ave. station looks like. It's open, but you can't get off there if you're on an express train. I kinda liked the idea that there were these various abandoned places on the New York subway system, that you could in some cases see, but not actually visit. (I mean without doing fairly extreme things like walking down the tracks, which some people do, but you sure ain't talkin' to me, to quote Charlie Poole.) These abandoned places reflect a sense of lost connections and anger, when you look at their pictures. It's pretty shocking that in a place as grand and organized as New York City you'd find so much anarchic expression.

I began to think of this ruin as symbolic of our current political tangle. Can the people who "own" this actually be expected to make sensible political decisions about their own futures. I read this week that a poll of Tea Party people in Texas yielded the strange and contradictory conclusion that these people--winning election all around the country--do not understand that the government assistance they themselves use and depend on will be destroyed by the kind of policies the people they vote for are advocating. Somehow the connections have been lost. It's just like the joke posters: get rid of big government, but don't touch my Social Security. The cartoons are true.

But then I found some other, contrary evidence. Check this out:

There are many art installations in the New York City Subway system. The part that is operating at least. These birds are part of a large number of cast bronze grackles and blackbirds installed around the Canal Street station. I can't think of anything much more hopeful. There's a whole lot of information on this phenomenon too. Here's a link to a whole book about art in the subway.

http://www.thecityreview.com/mtaart.html

Maybe they can even merge these two seemingly opposing trends. Here's the most amazing abandoned subway station, and it's been preserved apparently, although it's very hard to go there:

They closed this magnificent station when both the cars and trains were made longer, which made the curve too tight for the new trains to operate on. The ornate street entrance was demolished, and for decades the station sat dark and closed. But what the hell? The art of the station itself is as wonderful as the many art installations which the current subway system has deemed worthy of installation and maintenance. Maybe, instead of seeing a dismal trend towards entropy and anarchy, we ought to consider the possibility that we ride a tide. The red bud is out today. It's a good sign. Meanwhile, you can ride a train past that east side 18th street station. That's a pretty neat experience I'd think, and if I ever do get back to New York I think I'll make it a point.

Wood's Stacked

I was just surfing around and I ran into this, from David Seaton:

Before we get started, it would be useful to remember that the founding "parents" of the "conservative revolution" or "neo-liberalism" as it is known in Europe, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, both died of Alzheimer´s disease... This might not be the cause of the ongoing disaster, but it sure is a nifty metaphor for the situation we are in.

Regular readers of this blog know that one of my favorite hobby horses is criticizing the blockheadedness of post Cold War politicians who seem to have totally lost their fear of popular wrath.

Those who are cheerfully going about the work of dismantling the welfare state seem blissfully unaware that the welfare state was created by men as, or even more conservative than themselves, (Bismark, for example) in order to avoid revolutionary social movements which would destabilize and jeopardize the entire economic system and society itself. This was a strategy that was so eminently successful that it practically has destroyed revolutionary praxis.

http://seaton-newslinks.blogspot.com/2015/02/a-european-red-spring.html

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I was also thinking this week of Seamus Innis's wonderful extemporaneous remarks on the playing of the Ulllean pipes, made many years ago when recordings had two sides and came in what seem now to be gigantic packages, sometimes even boxes, with whole booklets inside, explaining all the music or whatever. See e.g., the Library of Congress's amazing "The Hammons Family of West Virginia," something I've been conversing about with a nice feller from Staunton, VA. And it being the birthday recently of James Joyce, and as well the anniversary of the publication of Ulysses, the Innis remarks seem even more appropriate.

There is always an awful lot to be said about this Irish traditional
folk music and folklore, because first of all you have to learn it, and
first you must learn the talk, and then you must learn the grip, and
after that you must learn the trucklyhowl, and then you have the
whole lot only just to keep on practicing it. Because Seamus Innis
knows far more about this than even the old folk lord-di-lordies thems-
elves, because Seamus Innis once met a little Lepprechaunie trucklyhowl
at the bottom of the garden gluth, and up and up the garden path, which came
up from that in the Limoreti-Limoreti hillhockers, before the Earthian
Throll, before the Lepprechaun era, and long before the Argy-Fargy.
And that was in the Depondoom, before the Emerald Isle was ever
dropped . . . plop plop . . . in the water.

You can hear this spoken on this site: http://joefago.com/The_Truckley_Howl.html

I take "truckley howl" to be the perfect description of what the Ulllean pipes sound like, by the way.

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Here's a photo of Major Franklin, who in the mid-1960s played the perfect version of Tom and Jerry.

I've been working on learning his version for a while. It's not easy, for all it seems so. It might be that I'm getting too old to learn a damn tune any more, for all the ones I know already seem to continue to improve in the playing, if only slightly. I agree with Franklin's way of doing things:

http://www.nationalfiddlerhalloffame.org/HallOfFame/majorfranklinbio.html

Occam's Razor

After a childhood nurtured by the Methodist Church as it was incarnated in Raleigh, NC during the era of racial segregation, I went off to UNC-Chapel Hill. My first year I started handing out pamphlets for the Student Peace Union, a tiny group of students who wanted to "ban the bomb." This group eventually became local leaders in the civil rights movement in Chapel Hill, which reached a kind of climax when a sit-in was held in the Chapel Hill Chamber of Commerce.

I dropped out of school in the fall of '63, and happened to be riding between Durham and Chapel Hill when the radio gave out the news that Kennedy had been killed in Dallas. In December I was sitting on a park bench at the old Capitol Building in Raleigh watching a Klan Rally in full regalia march past, something I didn't know was going to happen. I'd just gone down there to look at the monuments to the Civil War and toss peanuts at the squirrels. When I went back to Chapel Hill for the Spring Term, I started my study of philosophy. Mostly, philosophers tend to deride religious thinkers as a muddled lot. And indeed, it is hard to see why God is required for the practice of a moral life. What does God add? And what does the carrot/stick approach of heaven or hell add to the moral choice. Isn't "doing good" because otherwise you'll "go to hell" a way of coercion rather than of encouraging moral action and principle. And if an action is coerced, isn't its morality thereby diminished, if not destroyed.

This is Occam's Razor in action. And as a matter of personal fact, I do believe Occam's Razor is the best touchstone. However, the other day, when I used a picture of Ganesh to head my post about the Affordable Care Act, the picture itself spurred me to find out a bit about Ganesh, the Hindu deity which was omnipresent as Libby strolled around Bangalore recovering from her eye surgery.

I found out a few things. A tiny few admittedly. If you want to go follow the way of Ganesh after reading this, you will have a long path. But here are the few things.

Ganesh is the deity who overcomes obstacles. In order to do this, Ganesh rides a mouse. Why? Because a mouse can go anywhere. Thus, Ganesh's mount makes his power pervasive. I ask you, I dare you. Apply Occam's Razor to this! And this wonderful fact is but the tiny first step. The best is next.

Where, you may ask, does Ganesh originate? The answer is most wonderful. Ganesh originated in Shiva's laughter.

Here is Ganesh dancing (one of Shiva's favorite activities). His mouse is at the bottom if you look carefully:

There is the poetic way of thought, and the mathematical. There is the appollonian and the dionysian. As Wittgenstein said, the world is all that is the case. Herr Ludwig said much more, but I'll stop there.

Junior Wins Martinsville

We drove up to Martinsville in the early dawn on Sunday, leaving before much light. We'd paid a bit extra so we could go to some events with drivers in the morning, and the events included free coffee and doughnuts. Then we would get to go onto the actual track and watch driver intros, and stroll around touching close to the cars and pits. It was pretty darn fun. Libby bumped fists with almost all the drivers as they walked to the pickup trucks that they parade around the track in, before the ceremonies crescendo into the fly over and the roar of the engines and that faint sweet smell of the fuel mix. I stood a little back during the fist-bumping, but I think Kyle Busch saw my Interstate Battery 18 cap, and Miss Danica was lovely up close in her green sunglasses with the real gold frames, which I'd expect she put away before she put on her helmet. I mentioned those glasses to Libby and she said, well yes, Danica has a nice sunglasses line. But of course. People get on Danica, but there's not many models can drive a race car, and she can do that for real. As usual she did a fine job of the race, working her way up towards the front and past her relatively rookie boyfriend Stenhouse, although she got caught up in a late wreck involving Keselowski slowing down suddenly when something broke on his rocket and setting up an accordion wreck that left Kasey Kahne and Casey Mears smoking and still on the front stretch, and a silent few moments when the ambulances drove up, until the two guys climbed out their windows and waved ok to the crowd.

The two Palin cousins who were drinking beer just below us in the stands, and cheering wildly for Junior, gave her the finger when she limped past on her last lap, front wheel broken, to go behind the wall for good. The skinny one had some kind of cat's paw print tattoo behind her ear. But it did turn out that Junior won, which was great for everyone. Deal is, particularly in the south, at Martinsville and Darlington and Charlotte, Richmond and Bristol, Junior is everybody's favorite. Indeed, you can have a favorite, and still root for Junior too. In the driver intros we got to watch, Junior got three times the volume of whoops as any one else. Same, earlier, in the crowd Q&A sessions. During that, Junior said he never wanted to own a race team, but that he planned on racing till he's 80. Ten better than Mick said on Cavett, way back. Who knows, it might come true. In the Q&A we also got to listen to the new kid, Kyle Larson. This year the big deal rookie is one of the Childress grandkids, Austin Dillon, who affects a big Stetson like Richard Petty and swaggers without even knowing it. As Kyle pointed out modestly, he is eighty points up on Master Austin. Just sayin'.

So anyways, after 500 laps, Junior won, first time. The fall Martinsville race commemorates, for his team owner Rick Hendricks, a horrible event of ten years ago, when a plane carrying much of his family and friends crashed killing them all, on the approach to the Martinsville airport. Fog or something. He lost his twin nieces, his brother, his son, and a number of folks who worked for him. Ten. Junior said after the race that he knew sorta what that felt like. Jimmie Johnson said his wife was supposed to be on that plane, but got delayed at the last minute. It means a lot for a Hendricks driver to win at Martinsville, as they frequently do. Junior did a heartfelt burnout as you can see. Everyone left happy. Except for Harvick I mean. Harvick was pissed off and said that if he didn't win, neither would Kenseth, who had lost his footing in turn one (just below us) and collected Harvick as well. Junior said, before the race, that there's no point in getting mad at Martinsville. All the cars bang against each other.

Monday after a bleary work day I early voted. It was a relief. The Republicans think the voters are so stupid, it's reason in itself to vote all Democratic. Right now they're running incessant ads by a geezer named Randy Owen who once was a southern rock star in the band Alabama. He says absolutely nothing that might be construed as an actual reason to vote for Tillis, the crew-cut Republican badass who's trying to take Hagan's seat. "Just feels so right," he sings, over and over. Must have been one of his big "hits," back in the '70s. They played the damn thing three times running between innings last night in the KC/SF game. No doubt only in NC. Strikes me that the GOP in North Carolina has a bit of worry, otherwise why spend the money.

In the larger world, things go on. Here's something I read:

http://crookedtimber.org/2014/10/26/farewell-to-all-that/

This morning I also read, on our local TV website, that there's a big Southern Baptist gathering going on, and the faithful are being exhorted to "hold the line" against same-sex marriage. No doubt the faithful will imagine that Mr. Tillis is doing just that. Meanwhile, the faithful will carry on, having affairs, divorcing, chuckling at their old neighbor the florist who's just a little "light in the loafers," and ordering the flowers for the next wedding and/or funeral from him.

Never Heard This One Before

Kenny Baker was one of the greatest American fiddle players ever. He spent many years playing with Bill Monroe, and he'd come to Union Grover Fiddler's Convention when he had the time, and also was a friend of Tommy Jarrell's.

How to Win a Fiddle Contest

Mr. Kessinger was 71 when this was recorded. I turned 71 back in January of this year. I saw Mr. Kessinger a few times at the Union Grover Fiddlers Convention, in the late 1960s. He won every time he entered, hands down. I bought his LP but I couldn't figure out a lick of what he was doing. Well actually, thinking on those early days in more detail, I do believe there's one phrase in "Ragtime Annie" that I got from this master of masters. There's a man named Bobby Taylor, from Charleston, WV, who did figure out Mr. Clark pretty well. He's probably 60 or so, and has a CD out. And I think maybe Mr. Taylor has a family connection to the wizard of St. Albans, so he probably was soaking in the brew before he could read. That would have to help.

A Small Engagment Ends Well

About a month back the Craver, Hicks, Watson, Newberry Duo played an enjoyable gig up in Washington, VA in a pretty field down below the historic jail. While there was more law there than paying patrons, the jail still being in use, we played well and had a great time with our host and impresario, the Right Honorable Ben Jones, former Congressman from Georgia, former character player "Cooter" on the Dukes of Hazard back when we were all young and free and gas was 50 cents, same as Luckies.

This is some of the constabulary, viewing the situation as the stage is being finalized. You can see it was a beautiful setting, and later on Brer Ben mounted the stage and sang with his very capable country band, as well as MC-ing the whole deal and still finding time to take Craver and I on a grand tour of his digs, just outside of the town General Washington laid out back in 1749.

Anyways, Ben is a very engaged person in his life, and whilst he was working on this nice show, he also sent out a letter to his worthy constituents (to quote Dizzy Gillespie), which I will reprint here:

To The Editor:

There was a time not so long ago when the South was called “The Solid South” by the national Democratic Party and the national press. The Republican Party in the South was, where it existed at all, historically on “the disabled list.” The two-party system in the South was “The Democrats who were in, and the Democrats who were out.”

So the action was in the Democratic primary, where the eventual winner was inevitably coronated. So that was where Democrats voted, where Republicans voted, and where independents, libertarians and everybody else voted. The general election in November was an afterthought. It was, after all, a foregone conclusion that the Democrats would win. For many years in Virginia, that was most likely someone connected with the Byrd Machine.

With the shift to Southern Republicanism that began in the South in the 1970’s, the game has changed. But not all that much. Congressional re-districting (in which the inmates decide who is going to run the asylum) has resulted in Virginia having Congressional races for what are clearly “safe seats,” that is, seats drawn by the incumbents, of the incumbents, and for the incumbents. So the general election decision is made in the primaries. Unless there is an unexpected lightning strike, that is simply going to happen. It is the next thing to being disenfranchised.

But by voting for David Brat in the Seventh District Republican primary, we Democrats, independents, and Libertarians can make a big difference in American politics. It is your right to cast that vote. It is an “open” primary and it doesn’t preclude anyone from voting anyway they wish in November. It may be the only way to empower those who want to make a statement about the dysfunctional Congress and “politics as usual.”

From what I know of Dave Brat, he is a good, honest, and honorable man. And from what I know of Eric Cantor, I can say only that he ran a truly dishonorable campaign against me back in 2002. He ducked debates, slandered me in slick mailings, questioned my patriotism and even mocked my Southern heritage. He simply cannot be taken at his word. You can call that “sour grapes” if you want to, but I am just telling it the way it was, and surely is. I can tell you that you will likely hear the same thing from his other former opponents, both Republican and Democrat.

Under Cantor’s Majority Leadership, the Congress has sunk to its lowest public standing in history. Our nation has lost faith in our most important institutions. This is not a laughing matter. It is a national crisis. Eric Cantor should not be rewarded with another term.

Every 7th District voter, Republican, Democrat, Libertarian and Independent can take an historic action on Tuesday, June 10th. A vote for David Brat will be heard not just throughout Washington, D.C. but around the world.

Ben Jones
Washington, Virginia

It was a pleasure watching Mr. Cantor concede last evening, and an unexpected one. However things go in the fall, removing Mr. Cantor from the House of Representatives is a small bit of justice achieved. A tip of the Hatlo Hat to Mr. Jones, for his part in a small victory for sanity and the common man.

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Update:

Driftglass twitted the following last night: Brat ending his victory speech with "the Lannisters send their regards" seemed a trifle harsh. #RuinACantor

Over at Digby Laura Ingraham is given some credit for the results. This is certainly possible:
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2014/06/limbaugh-was-credited-with-winning-1994.html

As with many things in this great land of ours, conjunction is frequently mistaken for causation.

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Saturday 6/14 Update: Ben Jones gave an interview with Salon:

http://www.salon.com/2014/06/11/karma_for_eric_cantor_ben_cooter_jones_on_the_open_letter_that_helped_crush_a_political_hack/

Ben's probably right about Cantor running into karma, if you believe in that sort of mechanism. The fact that the GOP has now removed the one and only Jew from its congressional ranks can't be entirely coincidental, can it? And the fact that Cantor's Virginia Congressional district was gerrymandered yet again in 2010, presumably to further enhance Cantor's invincibility, must also be considered Cantor karma. However, I find Ben's outright support of Brat, now that Brat is the Republican choice, alarming. Mr. Brat is a Randite, a foe of Social Security, and even further to the right than Mr. Cantor. Moreover, Ben's characterization of the Democratic Party as drifting ever leftward seems strange and outright wrong to me--a cliche without much footing in reality. In 1992 the Democratic Party had a choice between Bill Clinton, a southern-state governor who seemed to be similar in his policies to what once was called the Rockefeller Republican, and Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa, who supported traditional labor positions and expressed much concern with America's over-seas loss of jobs. In electing Clinton, the Democratic Party moved to the right. Indeed, the Democratic Party has been chasing the Republicans ever rightwards since the '90s, vainly searching for the rightward shifting center. Even the Affordable Health Care Law is a solution to the terrible problem of health care accessibility in the United States which depends on the private insurance company sector for success. It was an idea developed by the Heritage Foundation and put into play in Massachusetts by an oligarch Republican governor.

Meanwhile, public schools and the Post Office are under sustained attack. It's hard to perceive much leftwards drift since the Reagan Revolution. President Obama is continually portrayed as a "leftist" by Fox News and the Many Pundits, but--as a right-leaning correspondent of mine says--he's really an "appeaser": of Republicans so intractable that it's been time and past for him to draw some red lines that have real teeth in them. Mr. Obama's efforts at reasonableness have led us to the sequester, and to a phony deficit crisis which could have been averted by making the plain case to the public that we simply must increase revenues if we are to do what must be done. Had Obama let the Bush tax cuts expire as planned, much of the energy behind Ryan's and Cantor's crocodile deficit tears would have been dissipated. Bush's "off the books" wars, plus the sequester sledgehammer, leads directly to the VA crisis of the moment. The Republicans have managed to make taxes, per se, a "leftist" endeavor. The Democrats have let them do it. Next week President Obama may yield to a neocon foreign policy which is an historically proven disaster and start down the path to a Third War in Iraq.

While I'm happy for Ben's success (insofar as Cantor's loss can be construed as Ben's doings), I would certainly hope that he would at this point move his support to a far more worthy candidate, Mr. Brat's Democratic opponent and University colleague. The country doesn't need more Rand Paul clones in an already broken Congress.