you'll never fail like common people, never watch your life slide out of view

More shots from NRV fair--








Movie Recommendation: Alison McLean's Jesus' Son (based on novel by Denis Johnson)

you wish upon a star, and it turns into a plane. i guess that's right on par, who is left to blame?

New River Valley Fair, Dublin, VA, July 26, 2008



just so there's no misunderstanding, I plan to vote for Obama



The photos above are from the NRV fair in Dublin, VA. This is the second year I've posted photos of the fair...here are the photos from last year. This morning, before going to the fair, I bought a book of poems by Bob Hicok at the Blacksburg YMCA thrift store. Someone had left a thank you note on page 13 (thank you for not pushing...something, the writing faded and became unclear). In any case, the note marked this poem.

Louise

She said I looked like jesus, and it was true. I looked
like the Jesus of Dayton
and Topeka, black hair brushing my shoulders and thin

as martyrdom, flesh denied but not vanquished, eyes blue
and deep-set, shadowed
like those in paintings she'd grown up with, the Savior

of dining rooms and VFW halls. A maid forever, she'd lived
on her knees, black
skin crosshatched with a web of white lines,

which from a distance looked like powder. We worked in a home
for the retarded,
each man having fallen from the womb with key

chromosomes snapped, though where I saw accident she found
plan. She talked
to God and God talked back, a running conversation

about degreasers, her son, the cabdriver from Trinidad
who refused to right
the cross hanging upside down from his mirror. Crazy

if you'd just met her, determined if you knew she was eighty,
alone, poor
because she believed the nonsense about love

and grace as discovered in acts rather than words, meaning
canned peaches, Wonder
Bread, even the transistor that no longer caught

any music that floated above 95 on the AM dial, were given
to kids and junkies
without question, without doubt that all human needs

are divine. My last day she asked that I stand in a doorway
for a picture. And
I was good, didn't ask if she perceived the irony

of a black believer wanting the image of a white agnostic,
but smiled, allowed her
to adjust my hair, and tried my best to suppose

redemption was not only warranted but possible, that
I could hang
from a cross and think of anything but revenge.

i've been out walking, i don't do too much talking these days

frat house, radford, va
i am different, radford, va

Nico, "These Days" (I started to post a version by Jackson Browne, who wrote the song, but Nico's take is more sad/haunting)

i pulled back the drape thing on the tent, there was a crystal ball on a table

--from "The Flaneur" chapter of Benjamin's Arcades Project:

"For the perfect flaneur,...it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, among the ebb and flow...To be away from home, yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the center of the world, yet to remain hidden from the world--such are a few of the slightest pleasures of those independent, passionate, impartial [!!] natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. The spectator is a prince who everywhere rejoices in his incognito....The lover of universal life enters into the crowd as though it were an immense reservoir of electric energy."--Baudelaire

"The steam vapor so detested by writers allows them to divert their admiration....Instead of waiting to visit the Bay of Bengal to find objects to exclaim over, they might have a little curiosity about the objects they see in daily life. A porter at the Gare de l'Est is no less picturesque than a coolie in Colombo....To walk out your front door as if you've just arrived from a foreign country; to discover the world in which you already live; to begin the day as if you've just gotten off the boat from Singapore and have never seen your doormat or the people on the landing...--it is this that reveals the humanity before you, unknown until now."--Pierre Hamp

Slint, "Breadcrumb Trail"

The night sky is a jewelry store window, and my mind is half a brick

Lemon's Jewelry, Stuart, VA

--from Robert Walser's "A Little Ramble"
Trans. Tom Whalen

"I walked through the mountains today. The weather was damp, and the entire region was grey. But the road was soft and in places very clean. At first I had my coat on; soon, however, I pulled it off, folded it together, and laid it upon my arm. The walk on the wonderful road gave me more and even more pleasure; first it went up and then descended again. the mountainous world appeared to me like an enormous theatre. The road snuggled up splendidly to the mountainsides. Then I came down into a deep ravine, a river roared at my feet, a train rushed past me with magnificent white smoke. The road went through the ravine like a smooth white stream, and as I walked on, to me it was as if the narrow valley were bending and winding around itself. Grey clouds lay on the mountains as though that were their resting place. I met a young traveller with a rucksack on his back, who asked if I had seen two other young fellows. No, I said. Had I come here from very far? Yes, I said, and went farther on my way. Not a long time, and I saw and heard the two young wanderers pass by with music. A village was especially beautiful with humble dwellings set thickly under the white cliffs. I encountered a few carts, otherwise nothing, and I had seen some children on the highway. We don't need to see anything out of the ordinary. We already see so much."

--from Thoreau's "Walking"

"I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks--who had a genius, so to speak, for SAUNTERING, which word is beautifully derived "from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going a la Sainte Terre," to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, "There goes a Sainte-Terrer," a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre without land or a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering. He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea. But I prefer the first, which, indeed, is the most probable derivation. For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels."

I can't be held responsible for the things I see, for I am just a vessel in vain

Gatewood Park, Pulaski, VA

I had the day off from work today, so I decided to drive to Pulaski and take photos. Once I got there, I didn't really feel like walking around town, so I drove up to Gatewood Reservoir (where the town gets its drinking water), and kayaked for an hour or so. A large chunk of that time was spent playing tag with the heron in the top shot. I kept trying to get close enough to get a decent shot with my 18-55 mm lens (about 10 ft. or so), but every time I started to close in the heron flew across the reservoir. When the heron took wing, I paddled across, first rapidly, then slow, increasing my stealth as I moved in closer. This happened about 20 times, but the top shot is the best one I got (which added to my appreciation of Jean Luc Mylayne's work).

I'm not sure why i took the other photos--the gold color of the water when the sun hit impressed me. I found myself reciting Robert Frost's "Nothing Gold Can Stay," corny I know (but perhaps a self-effacing kind of corny). It can't stay, I said to myself, it's the hardest hue to hold, clouds are on the way. I took the photo of the cloud because it was obscuring the sun. Just as Robert Frost said would happen, the clouds overtook the sun, and the gold vanished. While I was waiting for the sun to re-emerge and bathe me in gold and warmth and glad tidings, I looked up and took the shot of the stubborn, slow moving cloud. At that moment, I was thinking of Eggleston's Wedgewood Blue and those "unmoored spaces" (jesus, they're all unmoored) but I was also thinking, damn that's an impressive cloud. It made me think of a cathedral, and silence.

Bill Callahan, Retread Sessions, "Nothing Rises To Meet Me" and "Vessel in Vain"

I need a good brisk blues to help me get my shoes back onto that path of glory

Bassett, VA

Mayo Thompson, "Good Brisk Blues"

It's knowing that your door is always open, and your path is free to walk

Fairy Stone St. Park, Patrick County, VA

John Hartford, Tony Rice, Vassar Clements--"Steam Powered Aereo Plane"


"Gentle On My Mind"

tending the garden of change, the weeds grow in and rearrange

Seesaw, Northfork, WV

The Guatemalan Handshake--a quirky, poetic, beautifully photographed film. Here's what David Gordon Green, an excellent writer/director in his own right, had to say about it.

well i rode out to the ocean, and the water looked like tarnished gold

Horse and Leopards, Stuart, VA

Maurice Manning reading for the Cortland Review

Smog, "I Break Horses"

--3 poems by Jane Cooper

The Blue Anchor
The future weighs down on me
just like a wall of light!

All these years
I've lived by necessity.
Now the world shines
like an empty room
clean all the way to the rafters.

The room might be waiting for its first tenants—
a bed, a chair, my old typewriter.

Or it might be Van Gogh's room
at Arles:
so neat, while his eyes grazed among phosphorus.
A blue anchor.

To live in the future
like a survivor!
Not the first step up the beach
but the second
then the third

—never forgetting
the wingprint of the mountain
over the fragile human settlement—

Rent
If you want my apartment, sleep in it
but let's have a clear understanding:
the books are still free agents.

If the rocking chair's arms surround you
they can also let you go,
they can shape the air like a body.

I don't want your rent, I want
a radiance of attention
like the candle's flame when we eat,

I mean a kind of awe
attending the spaces between us---
Not a roof but a field of stars.

What the Seer Said
She said I would see the future,
that is to say, my father,
through an ophthalmologic device.

That man was no good, she warned,
but I persisted: No one,
no one has done me any harm.

The machine moved on silent wheels.
She fastened my eyes to two wells.
I was pasted to the deep.

The first image was of jangling
kaleidoscopic angles;
the second, inchoate dark.

From a constricted throat
I brought a few words: My father
was a generous man—but remote.

At remote the darkness unveiled
a mist-becalmed lake and pale
sky and hills like loaves—

blue on blue on blue,
undramatic, unconfused
as the fan of Ma-Yuän—

So this was my father's house!
this courteous, ancestral place!
I lifted my eyes, in relief,

and tasted the mortal cold.
I sat down by the water's edge, old,
deprived, at home, at peace.

My mind was wandering like the wild geese in the west

Collinsville, VA

Akron/Family performing "I Know You Rider" for Retread Sessions. Good music...also, I'm somewhat interested in so-called "freak folk" as a sort of postmodern pastiche at times bordering on parody. Whereas a good deal of 60's folk music maintained notions of authenticity/purity, in my view the more recent bunch seem more open, playful, and sophisticated when it comes to issues of representation. Rather than an attempt to appropriate an other's culture in an essential way, the zany headdresses and face paint and such strike me as a playful parody of the new-age hippy pose--a way of simultaneously celebrating and subverting those representations. Treating culture as a monolithic package that certain people are granted access to by virtue of their skin color or some other external criteria seems odd--and untrue--to me. In my view, the only thing "authentic" is the event, in this case music--in a constant state of becoming, note to note, regardless of what styles or techniques it incorporates.

I suppose I'm thinking about this because I just listened to this Akron/Family video, and it reminded me of a guy I know who detests Akron/Family, largely because he associates them with new-agers who take a week off from corporate jobs to attend sweat lodges in rented football stadiums in Arizona, sweating out the impurities of consumerist America by packaging and consuming another culture (which, minus belief, sounds kind of fun). I suppose that's why I don't think of Akron/Family or the other "freak folk" people in that way; they seem to have scrapped ideas of authenticity.

Contrast their music with most modern country. Although the musicians and record executives may not believe in the music (only its ability to sell), belief is nevertheless the bedrock of the package they're selling--belief in Bush's version of America, Christianity, middle-class values, the "way of life" the listeners are leading or would like to lead. Consider this from Kenny Chesney's "There Goes My Life": She had that Honda loaded down with Abercrombie clothes and 15 pairs of shoes and his American Express. He checked the oil and slammed the hood, said you're good to go. She hugged them both and headed off to the West Coast. That sort of thing certainly happens, but a semiotician would probably say the signs in the song prop up middle-class values and ideology. Country music has traditionally been about outsiders, people on the margins (not sociologically, but as individuals), but now that "country" is mainstream, I suppose it makes sense to do away with those marginal folks. The Chesney song is at least a little more subtle in its politics than some country music. At work yesterday--in the company truck--I had to listen to a song I find even more repulsive, Darryl Worley's "Have You Forgotten," with the volume turned up so that everyone in the 7-11 parking lot would, as my fellow employees might say, know how we roll.

I hear people saying we don't need this war
I say there's some things worth fighting for
What about our freedom and this piece of ground?
We didn't get to keep 'em by backing down
They say we don't realize the mess we're getting in
Before you start preaching
Let me ask you this my friend

Have you forgotten how it felt that day
To see your homeland under fire
And her people blown away?
Have you forgotten when those towers fell?
We had neighbors still inside
Going through a living hell
And you say we shouldn't worry 'bout Bin Laden
Have you forgotten?

There's more, but you get the idea. The song made me want to scream in so many obvious ways--who has forgotten about Bin Laden? How does invading Iraq have anything to do with Bin Laden or 9/11? Who is guilty of attempting to limit the images of war in the media, and what are their reasons? I would've have liked to discuss the song and the war and the direction America is heading with my fellow employees--most of whom I consider good guys in their day to day lives, people I wouldn't hesitate to call friends--but they don't respond to reason, logic, or facts. I'll admit I'm also a little wary of reason, logic, and facts, but I'm also wary of propaganda. The pervasiveness and popularity of the kind of ideas spewed out on television and in most mainstream music frightens me, and it seems silly to attempt to attack those ideas head on.

In any case, I believe I'll stop here. I'm starting to bore myself, so I think I'll take the dog for a walk, maybe ask him what he thinks of the arbitrariness of signs.

If heaven's tits were gleaming up to tease me, I'd tumble down the basement stairs

Temptations Lingerie, Collinsville, VA

The lyric above comes from Palace's "The Spider's Dude Is Often There." I haven't posted anything Will Oldham related for a while, but a couple of nights ago while browsing youtube I found this video of Oldham (Bonnie "Prince" Billy) performing "Goat and Ram" in Tel Aviv. I'm having trouble thinking of a clever way to explain how great this performance (and video) is, so check it out.

Also, here's an article Oldham wrote for The Guardian prior to releasing Greatest Palace Music, Oldham as Bonny's countrypolitan re-workings of Palace material. In the article, Oldham offers a pretty funny tongue-in-cheek account of Bonnie "Prince" Billy's emergence.

Oldham on Bonnie
For the second album, I placed my own darkened visage on the cover to rein in his callous insolence. When after the fourth release I had our record service place my own name on the new merchandise, he assailed me with threats of arbitration. He threatened to expose our beguiling arrangement unless I put his new and gaudy stage name, Bonnie "Prince" Billy, on the spines of all future releases.

Because I was convalescing from a painful cryptorchism at the time, I complied with all his demands. From my attic sickbed window I saw how Billy shouldered former playmates out of the way on the village square. He soon acquired a New York tailor and a team of fast horses that blasted by the salutations of old friends.

When I requested that he begin to perform favoured older works such as Silver Threads Among the Gold and Kathleen Mavourneen, he balked and instead added the songs of rude and unscrupulous cads like Kenneth Chesney and Timothy McGraw to his live repertoire. How I dreamed of walloping him with my withered arm! When, furthermore, he informed me that he had secretly recorded an album of my early compositions in the mode of these Nashvillian omnibus conductors, my dormant brinkmanship was finally aroused.

Bonnie on Oldham
It became time, as it will always become time, for a man to do something right and claim his own. What happened then is that I told him (because he didn't know - no he didn't) about foods and sunshine, about good and healthy joyful living, all things that he loathed and was sure were unnecessary but are not, as we know! Good God and just breathing and sucking a lungful of pure water! God, endorsing the muscles of the leg! Climbing trees, please, and telling her that you love her and asking her, for instance: "Where does this limb go, prithee, please tell me it goes ... right ... there" - and it does!

Well, he didn't know any of this. He probably never will. But I do and won't unlearn it. So I will now personify the alleviation of his constant misery. And what I have done is to seal it all beneath my ribs, these baby songs that I have made my own by saying so. They can live more and higher and richer in my throat; finally cleared of his Gollum sputum, they are really very pretty.

Finally, I want to make a toast to him inside his private hell: here's to you, Will, and your happiness. You may now bow down, and kiss the boot of Bonnie "Prince" Billy!

jackie is just speeding away, she thought she was james dean for a day

James Dean Cookie Jar, Dublin, VA

lou reed walking on the wild side through the years:

1974, Sydney, + interview with Australian journalists

1976, German tv, cuts off before song is over :( very good version, though

1982, live somewhere with VU

1997, VH1 Special

2007, Italy, Berlin Tour (can't believe I missed the show in Asheville, NC that was part of this tour--Berlin is one of my all time favorite albums.

we don't want freedom, we don't want justice, we just want someone to love

I had the day off from work today, so I drove down to the Salem fair to take a few photos and maybe buy a giant corndog or a basket of fried oreos or something. When I arrived (around 12), a person at the gate informed me that I couldn't get in until 4 o'clock, so I went to Given's Books and sifted through the stacks. I ended up buying Charles Wright's Appalachia, Harry Caudill's Night Comes to the Cumberlands , Camus' Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, Robert Walser's Jakob Von Gunten, and the book that accompanied David Byrne's film True Stories--all for $12.87, less than I'd pay for one new paperback at Barnes and Noble. While filming True Stories, Byrne invited photographers William Eggleston and Len Jenschel to document the movie (what a gig!); the book collects those photos along with Byrne's photos, the movie script, and several essays, reviews, etc. In case anyone is interested, Eggleston's photos for the book can be viewed here. Some of the photos were taken on the movie set, and others were taken in the surrounding area in Texas.

A storm rolled in just as I arrived back at the fairgrounds; rather than leave without visiting the fair, I waited the storm out in my truck, watching the windows fog up, looking through the Eggleston and Jenschel photos, and reading Camus' thoughts on the role/responsibility of an artist. After the storm passed, I strolled around the main loop at the fair a few times, but I lost some of my enthusiasm for taking photos. Because of the storm there weren't many people milling about, which was kind of nice because it made things less chaotic, but it also meant that my camera was obvious to everyone. Every other person seemed to be shooting me hostile looks, which made me self-conscious and made it difficult to photograph odd things I noticed--like giant idealized corndogs or hundreds of tiny plastic American flags arranged around temporary tattoos proclaiming things like "Sexy Bitch." To me, such things have obvious photographic appeal, but to the vast majority of people photographing a corn dog sticker is beyond weird. Which is kind of ironic, given that one of the main draws of a fair is the heightened level of absurdity.

In any case, here's a scene from True Stories featuring Byrne and the St. Thomas Aquinas elementary school chorus (finding the book was a bit of serendipity, since the film is--at least in part--about the quirkiness of America). Also, the rest of my photos from the fair.

Some hats are shaped like Oklahoma

LUV Homes, Dublin, VA

Peter Murphy (of Bauhaus) covering Pere Ubu's "Final Solution"


--some words about the song.

Sandy, the fireworks are hailing over little Eden tonight, forcing a light into all them stoned out faces left stranded on this 4th of july

IF, Radford, VA
Lion's Club Flea-Market, Dublin, VA

--for your 4th of july listening pleasure:

Springsteen "Sandy (4th of July, Asbury Park)", @ Hammersmith Odeon, 1975


"Stars and Stripes Forever (Muppets Version)"

Men of good fortune often cause empires to fall, while men of poor beginnings often can't do anything at all

Welch, WV

--3 by James Wright

A First Day in Paris

Some twenty years ago I was still a young man. I did not know anything more about Paris than a small black-haired sea tern knows about inland mountain gardens on the first day of his life. All he does is gaze around him, puzzled at the solitary distances of the ocean. How many mountains I have flown across, how many nests I have lain down in and abandoned between the big American cities. Now I walk the gardens of the Tuileries. Here, a song tells me, some twenty years ago the chesnut buds in April were too heavy to bear themselves any longer. When a late frost fell on them, they suddenly shuddered in the night, and the next morning they opened, green as before, in spite of everything. The startled frost ran off and vanished, and the open blossoms turned white in their own good time. In Paris the natural world, alert and welcome in a moment to its own loveliness, offers a strange new face, as though God were creating it for the first time. Sometimes the women in the Tuileries grow so old they outlive death, and their shadows lie on chesnut leaves like sunlight.

In Exile

I kneel above a single rail of the Baltimore and Ohio track. The little green snake lies there blazing on the steel. It is almost perfect noon. He has no shadow to cast anywhere. But even if it were twilight, he would have slight shade to cast. What can I do to join him? His face seems turned toward the fireweed along the track. I too turn my face and gaze at the fireweed along the track. The roots must be healthy. I sit back on the rail and see it burn. The garter snake does not seem troubled. He may not be gazing at the fireweed at all. We may be praying the same prayer. I hope not. I draw his face close to me, and he looks a little mournful, but not old, and not alone.

The First Days
Optima dies prima fugit

The first thing I saw in the morning
Was a huge golden bee ploughing
His burly right shoulder into the belly
Of a sleek yellow pear
Low on a bough.
Before he could find that sudden black honey
That squirms around in there
Inside the seed, the tree could not bear any more.
The pear fell to the ground,
With the bee still half alive
Inside its body.
He would have died if I hadn't knelt down
And sliced the pear gently
A little more open.
The bee shuddered, and returned.
Maybe I should have left him alone in there,
Drowning in his own delight.
The best days are the first
To flee, sang the lovely
Musician born in this town
So like my own.
I let the bee go
Among the gasworks at the edge of Mantua.

For every man that will last, there's nothing he can't get past

Pulaski, VA
Pulaski, VA

Honey
--James Wright

My father died at the age of eighty. One of the last things he did in his life was to call his fifty-eight-year-old son-in-law "honey." One afternoon in the early 1930's, when I bloodied my head by pitching over a wall at the bottom of a hill and believed that the mere sight of my own blood was the tragic meaning of life, I heard my father offer to murder his future son-in-law. His son-in-law is my brother-in-law, whose name is Paul. These two grown men rose above me and knew that a human life is murder. They weren't fighting about Paul's love for my sister. They were fighting with each other because one strong man, a factory worker, was laid off from his work, and the other strong man, the driver of a coal truck, was laid off from his work. They were both determined to live their lives, and so they glared at each other and said they were going to live, come hell or high water. High water is not trite in southern Ohio. Nothing is trite along a river. My father died a good death. To die a good death means to live one's life. I don't say a good life.
I say a life.