Carolina Chocolate Drops in Morgantown, NC

Wow. Tonight, for a couple of hours, Morgantown, NC, became the temporary headquarters of the world of music as the Carolina Chocolate Drops lifted the town from its foundations so it could dance in the air with joy.

These guys are good, and they are a blast. If you haven't seen them, drop whatever else you have planned and end your pursuit of happiness by joining them in their next performance. To say they have rhythm is to compare them with ordinary groups. To call their music "toe-tapping" is to ignore the rest of your body that you will find yourself also tapping to their performance. They can speed up music until it becomes a brand new dimension. The photograph accompanying this post looks like a long-range photo made from a balcony under dim lighting conditions at slow-shutter speed. Wrong - it actually was made with a new scientific camera operating at 1/8,000 of a second - they are THAT fast!

The main reason for attending one of their performances though, is to get happy. The Carolina Chocolate Drops are obviously SO happy in the work they do that the joy flows into the audience where it is transmuted into more happy rhythm. The group played guitar, banjo, fiddle, psalter?, jug, harmonica, castinets, spoons, jew's harp, penny whistle?, drums, and even the amazing whatnot. They also sang, danced and performed some acrobatics.

The Piedmont - shed

Here is the Piedmont with its gravel drive,
the always-cut grass, the great old tree.
There’s a chicken yard and a dog kennel,
attatched to this neat old shed.
But the greatest icon of them all
is the pole with a basket, backboard and goal!
Sure, it’s battered and bent from many a shot
but it shows to every passer-by that the only
true color in our whole world
is the color that we call blue.

Pumpkin Toss

The sun is now touching the horizon at 7 p.m., and the nights are cool. Mornings are downright cold - down into the 40s! The early dew is heavy and will send shivers through your body. Then of course, you find it was all just a game as the sun gets on up and brings the thermometer up with it. But then comes 7 o'clock again and the sun is partly hid.

Grass grows green and great - it's bluegrass and fescue, mostly and they are cool weather grasses. Trees haven't turned yet, dogwoods are dragging, looking a little distracted, kind of like they're tired of leaves. First Christmas decorations have already been reported, the big busy boxes in the strip malls are looking a little distracted, kind of like they're tired of inventory.

Evening comes again now, and a chilly breeze turns the delivery of autumn color in front of a church here in Hickory into a Pumpkin Toss as the sun splashes sunsets high into the sky, high and bright like it's trying to get our attention and tell us something.

Poetry Alive in Hickory - September Edition

Lots of good stuff tonight, and as usual, the best part was the gathering together of poets to speak, think, feel and spread their wings for a trip to amazing places in the human psyche. It was generally an evening spent on the dark side of that psyche, but still brilliant in the light that was shown in places too often avoided.

Pat Riviere-Seel read from her book The Serial Killer's Daughter. Powerful, touching, pulling stories. Riveting in the revelations surrounding the execution of a plan that resulted in the accidental death of hopeless victims.

Molly Rice told stories beyond belief, of a world known to only a very few people - at least, I hope. It was a great science-fiction horror tale of trapped humans and their trapped children. Unintended victims of corporate textile mills, long-term pain and prescription drug overdoses. Stories of the unpaid costs that wound up as profits in the pockets of the elite but also to the spirit of humanity which endures and which could lead us to create a better world.



To see Jessie Carty's video of the reading: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5tZDhePR6Y

Murray and Brock at Lenoir-Rhyne University

To Lenoir-Rhyne University tonight to see a Faculty Recital with Jack Murray playing woodwinds and Anna Brock, piano. Mr. Murray played piccolo, flute, oboe, clarinet, saxophone and alto saxophone.

Mr. Murray had played at the inauguration ball for George Bush in 2005, and he has also toured with a number of groups including the Temptations, Frankie Vail, Four Seasons, Natalie Cole, Ray Charles, Tony Bennett, Manhattan Transfer, Rosemary Clooney, Steve Allen, Johnny Mathis, Barry Manilow, Linda Ronstadt, and believe it or not - a number of others.

Anna Brock is a graduate of Oberlin College Conservator, studied vocal accompaniment in Stuttgart, Germany, and has performed with Charlotte Symphony and for Broadway touring productions. Currently she is a professor of music theory at Charlotte Latin School.

I thought the music was weird. Shows you which musical rock I'm hiding under. It was obviously a showcase of talent and virtuosity, that much was clear, even to me. Everyone was impressed at the number of instruments Mr. Murray played, and how easily he appeared to do that. I loved watching Ms. Brock's facial expressions during some of the more difficult portions. I tried to make a photograph of her but was working with a camcorder still-shot in dim light at 35X from about 200 feet. She obviously has has a soul for music that reaches deeply into the hearts of other people.

"Lost Highway" in Blowing Rock, NC

A play centering around the incredible Hank Williams. Presented at the Hayes Performing Arts Center in Blowing Rock, NC. We saw the Sunday edition yesterday. It was stunningly good.

Two great performers hypnotized the audience as the play revolved around them.

Tyson Jennette played “Tee-Tot”, and had everyone hanging on his words, gestures and even his grunts as he played the “heart” which “thumped” under Hank William’s career. He was the connection to earth, to dirt, to the mud of the swamp, the people whose souls cry out in despair over failure and even the loss of hope itself. Jennette's performance made the play fly and soar rather than just work.

Kim Cozort played the “Waitress”. But far more than that she played the hearts and souls of all the people who ever heard Hank Williams sing. She is the dreamer who scrubs the floors and and cleans up after others but can still be happy because Hank understands her and her problems, and he is there with her, and he can transmute her lonliness into dreams of joy. She waits on people and responds to the songs that Williams sings, resonating to them better than the guitar that he holds in his hands. She was as good as I have ever seen anyone perform.

Ben Hope played Hank. Rough job, tough job, nobody really wants to go head-to-head with Hank Williams. Hope did, and he did such a good job I actually asked him after the performance, who did the singing? He smiled and said “I did.” Well, I remember Hank, and I could tell the difference between Hank and Hope. Sometimes. Good job acting, playing guitar, and singing. Not easy, but he made it look like fun, and everybody was thrilled.

Stephan Anthony played "Hoss" and turned out to be one of the late blooming heroes in the play. In final essence he really played man’s conscience at its best. He showed that "Man" has the capability to rise to meet the needs produced by bad events. A being that few of us will ever really meet. And he did it well. Drew Perkins, “Loudmouth”, basically played himself which is far beyond the skill and ability of most musicians. He’s worked with Patsy Cline and Minnie Pearl, and been the musical director for a number of state performances. His role in the play was to play "music" itself, which "knew" what needed to be done and how it "should" be played and he provided the night sky against which the falling star of Hank Williams was seen.

A few of the famous songs written and sung by Hank Williams were featured in the program and they were presented in a memorable manner. Once again, the reality sinks in that this great performer did all his work and was dead and gone before his 30th birthday.

Photography of the performance and settings was prohibited.

Morning Cool

Walking through the early dew,
bare toes in Tevas showering
with night-wrung water
lying cool in morning shadows.
Great blue sky arcing wide,
streaked like watercolor flowing,
long white cirrus feathers reaching
as if Morning might be stretching,
and inviting you to come and dance
while both of you
still have your cool.


© John Womack, 2009, All rights reserved.

Sky Mice

A deadly new form of flying mice have struck the piedmont recently. Sunday evening they attacked Hickory, NC, making off with several citizens. Here is an actual photograph of one of the abductions. A large number of armed inhabitants of the city fired their handguns at the beast, but of course, without effect. By Monday afternoon, no inhabitants had been reported missing, so now authorities are turning their inquiry toward investigating if perhaps the mice were dropping aliens into the city. All citizens have been instructed to stay indoors if clouds appear, to conduct searches for family members and friends and to report any aliens they may encounter. The United States Air Force was contacted by the Hickory mayor about the sky mice attack but the Air Force has not yet responded.

© John Womack, 2009, All rights reserved

Goodbye Solo in Hickory, NC

A character-actor framework with two real knockouts, an old guy named Red West and newcomer Souéymane Sy Savané. Remember that last name! (and see ANY other movies featuring him) There were also three or four good support roles in a cab driver called Mamadou (Mamadou Lam) and Alex (Diana Franco Galindo). J. Malaak Juuk had as brief a role as one can get but played it startlingly well as the motel janitor. Other supporting roles were professionally played

Writer is Bahareh Azimi who is listed as a water engineer, architect, interior designer and songwriter who also co-authored a previous movie. Probably the movie’s weakest point is its story and screenplay. How the connection of the two stars ever started in the beginning of the movie was simply ignored. No revelation for the reason subsequently surfaced as the movie progressed. The audience has to just ignore that and wait for the good acting to take hold. Too bad - with a good "hook" at the beginning, this movie could have been be a real seat-clencher. It's still worth it. West hit home run after home run all night long and Savané will amaze you - this guy is a former flight attendant and fashion model, but look out world!

Lots of good revelation of character, no real character development. The main story has to be the concept of family, and about countries that have strong families and those that really have none.

This movie was brought to Hickory, NC, by Alan Jackson and his Footcandle Film Society. For more information see http://www.footcandle.org/

Half Blood Prince

I saw the first Harry Potter movie, back near the beginning of time, and had not gone there again. Now, one of my grand daughters got me to take her to see the “Half-Blood Prince”, a movie she had seen before, and I was anxious to catch up where I left off.

It was fun. But you got to go with the flow. You have to play YOUR part in the movie, too. You have to know the background, just like a person who is “street smart”, you have to be “Potter smart”. Otherwise the writing is a drag. And I mean it - it just drags the viewer from one point of action on down the road to the next point. The acting is a form of vocal miming and the actors seem to be caricatures of the characters they supposedly represent. If there is any development of character in the movie - well - it looks like Poor ole Harry is becoming a case of arrested development. He NEEDS to move on. I clearly missed the magical power of actors really acting since these guys basically just struck statuesque poses to communicate a vague understanding that certain concepts were beginning to emerge and develop in their brains. A little like watching a ballet in 1/640 time. They made Jack Benny look like the Keystone Cops. Then - of course, there were the jet-motorcycle-witches broom-hockey games in the sky. Wow.

In my opinion, the photography is awful. The movie is dark and the photography is dark, and it takes refuge in that fact. To be fair, there are several amazing vistas shown, but the movie concentrates on strange artifacts which apparently represent devices that these semi-mystic-savages use for unexplained purposes. There are a lot of astonishing visual effects that are clearly the highlight of the show. Instead of “music”, the movie had “sound” which varied in intensity and sometimes made the walls of the theater vibrate. It tried to tell you when to pay attention and when you didn’t really have to. And, of course just when you really don't have to pay attention, something big goes off. The lighting was flirty and interesting. But any pretense at storytelling has long ago been abandoned in lieu of pretending to tell a story that can never become a story because it must not ever end. Because then, the money ends, and it generates a LOT of that!

Overall it was like watching an old baseball player, still on his happy pills, still hitting home runs because he gets hit higher than the balls will ever go - never mind that he can’t play the game any more, people still come to cheer because he might hit another one out.

And - by the way - and this bothered me a little bit in the first movie - where are the computers?

Folkmoot 2009 - International Day

Folkmoot! Interntional Day! What more needs to be said? What more CAN be said? If you haven't been there you have a gift of great value awaiting you. You will have to wait another year to open it though because it is packing its charms today, and the people who have come to Waynesville from the corners of the earth prepare to return to their respective corners.

Folkmoot is a two-week long international celebration of food, costume, traditions, music and dance. Participants come from various counties and perform in the mountains of WNC. The last Saturday is designated International Day and the main street of Waynesville is turned into a pedestrian mall with performances all day long on both ends of the street. In between performances, visitors stroll through kiosks and the shops of Waynesville, eating, shopping and meeting the international performers who are also walking the street as anxious to meet Americans as we are to meet and talk with them. It is one of the great happenings of the year in this part of the world. In 2009, the participants have come from Greece, Israel, Mexico, Romania, Togo, Serbia, Spain and the Netherlands.

The Streets of Waynesville

Easy to overlook in the glare of nearby Asheville, Waynesville has its own charm and its own talents. There are writers here and photographers also, and those other people who conjure magik out of paintbrushes onto canvas, paper and whatnots. The old mountain crafts are alive and well in Waynesville and available for purchase on Folkmoot's International Day. This is the day to be here and it is the place to buy all those wonderful Christmas and birthday gifts that you will proudly present at appropriate times later in the year.

Not all the great artists of Waynesville work with brush, camera or pencil, some of them make their art in the presentation of their shops. Here's one with the loveliest accommodation for passers-by that I have ever seen. And I use that term in the broadest sense of its metaphysical implications. You CAN'T walk by here without sitting down - it's right on the sidewalk, and you feel like you've finally come home when you do!

Other places in Waynesville prepare their art on plates that they present before you as you clasp your hands in joy and raise your eyebrows high over your pursed lips. On International Day in Waynesville, there is SO much to choose from that NObody can do it right. There are vendors beyond comprehension who are providing ethnic food from many kiosks. I always intend to eat a lot of food there, but I usually bomb out in Nick and Nate's where I gravitate to their pizza buffet and a GREAT glass of Alleycat Ale. If you are lucky, you may have to wait for a table. If that happens, go down toward the buffet line, on the right, and you will see ALL of the roasted, salted peanuts ever cooked in the entire world. The first one or two may not taste very good, but if you go beyond that, the waiters may have to drag you away to your table, kicking and screaming when it comes ready. (That has happened to me several times,)

And there is permanent art here too. Sly foxes watch as you walk past them on the sidewalks. There is a great alligator made out of - nuts and bolts. There are whimsical things that seem to float in some eternal breeze, and of course, who could miss these guys?

Faces of Folkmoot

The real story is in the faces of people. This is where the real stories are told. It's another language. Not easy to learn. Not if you are over about twelve years of age, so you may have to regress a bit. People will tell you a lot of made-up stories, but it is their faces that tell the real story. Here is a brief look at some really interesting stories that cry out for the great artists and writers to come before them and interpret what they are desperately trying to tell us.

And one more thing. Some of us are bashful, and wilt before beautiful women from faraway places, and would never know how to photograph the prettiest faces in the world. How can you learn how to make fabulous photographs like these on this page? EASY. Come to Waynesville next year and see some of the greatest sights on the planet!

Any men? Yeah, there are some men around during the presentations and I make some of their pictures too, but I really don't know very much about them.



(Remember - all these pictures will enlarge if clicked on.)

Apollo - The Great Mistake

40 years is a long time even in biblical terms, but it seems even longer since Apollo 11 made its journey to Tranquility. Many of us who were already in the missile business at that time felt that it was a mistake to go to the moon before we were ready, but even we had no ideal that it would turn out to be as bad as it did.

The great alternative of course was to build space stations. Not just one but several. One basic pattern called for six. Four of them would be spaced evenly around the earth more or less equatorially and two others in a general polar orbit, one north, one south. Another plan called for placing a collection of stations together in one area of the sky to be used as a storage/repair/construction/command location. From these staging stations, journeys to the moon and elsewhere in the solar system would be much easier since they would be free of the heavy lift required to escape the earth’s gravity and also free of the earth’s weather. A true Space Command would become an integral part of the United States Air Force available for both defense and humanitarian missions, and accidents like those which destroyed the Columbia could have been easily avoided.

How much money would this have cost? Not that much - considering what we did spend elsewhere. The total cost of the Apollo space program itself is commonly given as $25 billion, adjusted to 2005 dollars this would approximate $135 billion. Meanwhile, the American war against Vietnam cost $686 billion in 2008 dollars, and the American war against Iraq has cost over $900 billion in 2008 dollars. We could have several permanent stations on the moon and explored Mars for those outlays alone. And of course, the money spent on the space stations would have had positive results for our national economy, education system, military defense and opportunities for international leadership and cooperation.

But when Project Apollo reached the end of its road with number 17, the ships and rockets were taken apart, the facilities were stripped down, the engineers and scientists let go to get a “real” job, and that incredible capacity for space flight was blown into the void. Now, 40 years later, we’re still trying to build one space station. And we currently have no space ships left to even reach that one station. Russia, China, India are moving on. America is fighting needless wars and celebrating footprints in the dust.

To the Moon

When I entered the Air Force missile program back in 1962, the biggest ICBM we had was the Atlas D. It had a thrust of 150,000 pounds and when it lifted off it shook the entire earth. It was awesome. When I first visited Vandenberg AFB in California in 1963, the Titan I had arrived. It generated 300,000 pounds of thrust and people there said “it doesn’t ‘lift off’, it just sits there and pushes the earth away”. The Apollo 11 moon rocket had 25 times THAT much power at 7,640,000 pounds of thrust.

Apollo's very name seemed strange - Apollo -Why would the god of the sun be selected to visit the earth’s moon? And the orbit of the moon, turned out to be a rough, bouncing ride, surprising everyone.

Then there was the sight of a human being walking on the moon. He kicked dust and it flew. Wow . What a sight! Only gods are supposed to do or see things like that!

Finally, when they came back. I wondered why no one on any of the TV networks played excerpts from the largo of the second movement of Dvorak’s Symphony #9, but no one did. So that’s really why I tried to write this poem.

TO THE MOON

With a stunning explosion of thunder and fire
The swooning Earth is shoved away;
Apollo now stands alone in space,
And reaches to grasp the moon.

Three quiet days through a strange new world,
Across a sea with no bottom; through a sky with no light;
Man’s hand holds the tiller’s helm tight,
But Apollo leads the way.

A rendezvous with destiny in deep dark space.
As the God of the Sun becomes a moon of the Moon.
Then Apollo lofts Eagle to carry Earth’s child
From bouncing orbit to Tranquility.

Oh Moon look! See thy dust fly high -
Kicked far and wide by dancing man!
The pulse thou stirred in ancient seas
Now comes to thee to stir thine own.

Then Eagle flies with a mighty leap
And returns to perch on Apollo’s glove.
with a prize so great that Eagle is freed -
and Apollo and man take moon dust home.

Going Home, Going home! Yes, we’re going Home!
At least, we are returning to where we left;
But home can never be the same -
As before Apollo left.

© John Womack, 2006. All rights reserved.

Moon Landing

Forty years ago I was sitting in front of a little black and white TV set in North Dakota watching the impossible happen. Of course I had my camera and these are the pictures I got. Pictures are grainy? Well, my camera was a lot better than our TV was then. We could only pick up two TV stations, fortunately we could see the moon landing.

It is all different now. Back then - on July 20, 1969 - NOBODY knew what was going to happen in the next five minutes. All the way there, everybody knew that it might end up with them making a low pass at the moon and coming back home. The were going to TRY to land, but they didn’t know what was going to happen. NObody knew. During the descent of the Lunar Module to the Moon’s surface, we all knew the astronauts might have to abort and return.


Now at 1,000 feet above the surface of the moon and about a minute of descent fuel remaining we know we are committed. We're obviously going down. Will we land or crash? At this point nobody knows. . . stay tuned.



The module has landed. For a long time it seems quiet. Nobody in the entire world is breathing



It worked! The module actually did land on the moon! And they are alive! And talking! Wow. What had seemed virtually impossible now quickly becomes more normal.


We can hear the communications between crew and ground control, and we are updated with overlays. Man has now been on the moon for 9 minutes and 9 seconds.






Later Buzz Aldrin comes on to the moon surface.









Planting the Flag.

Requiem for Apollo

When Kennedy made his audacious commitment to put a man on the moon and bring him back safely home on May 25, 1961, I was preparing to enter the missile part of the Air Force, into what we were already beginning to call the “Space Program”.

I was stationed at Langley AFB, VA, which was the headquarters of the agency still called NACA, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the forerunner of NASA which had already been renamed in 1958, but most of the signs had still not been changed.

Some of the initial “astronauts” were already on Langley in the early 1960s, and were slowly becoming reasonably well known, although there was a considerable air of uncertainty back then - were they actually going to fly in space or not? Nobody really knew for sure. It would probably happen sometime, but maybe not for many, many years. Sputnik had already made its trip, and Gagarin had flown his orbit in April of 61, though so this air of uncertainty was balanced by the strange feeling that there were great forces already in process that ultimately could not be controlled.

The Mercury astronauts had a different mission than the rest of us but they spent as much time away from Langley as we flight crew members. From time to time we met them and would encounter them on the base. Once I remember letting my wife out of the car on a rainy afternoon at the Officer’s Club and she walked under a canopy to the main door, where it was opened for her by John Glenn, Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, and Alan Sheppard. They exchanged a word or two, waved at me, and she entered. Big deal? Not nearly as big as it seems today.

I met Gus Grissom on several occasions, once at the BX while buying a birthday card for my sister-in-law. I got a card with a picture of the moon and a statement about it. I asked Gus if he would also sign it, and he did so with great enjoyment.

After Kennedy’s commitment though, everything began to change. Everything. NASA was now crushed under the flow of money falling into and upon its projects. More and more work was transferred from Langley and Wallops Island to Canaveral, a spot picked out for NASA the year the Civil War ended, by one of their first "pioneers", Jules Verne.

Then Kennedy was assassinated. Right after that I was assigned to the Titan II missile program. Space was now the coming attraction for both military and commercial activities, and I was getting in on the ground floor. There was only one little cloud in my sky and it was far, far away, off in one of the most beautiful places on any planet, Vietnam. It was still officially at peace, but the French had been defeated in the re-imposition of their colonial rule after W.W.II, and now we were nosing around there with "advisors". The deaths of Earthquake McGoon and, nineteen days later, Robert Capa in Vietnam were ominous warnings that it could really turn out to be very, very bad. Both Apollo and Vietnam would continue to grow, eventually competing for the same dollar.

There is no way to prove that Vietnam spending had any effect upon the Apollo program or any follow-on space related projects, but there was a continual competition for money. A new unease with the American government developed because of problems with both the war and the civil rights movements and that remains with us today. One of the stories totally lost in all of this competition for money and talent was the American Space Program. Vietnam came first, Civil Rights also came first. Then came Apollo. Once man walked on the moon, the importance of the space program ended. Any hope for a continuing American presence in space would have to be deferred for many, many years. America was engrossed in short-term objectives, another war it couldn’t escape from, and long neglected obligations here at home.

Poetry Alive in July

July's edition of POETRY ALIVE in Hickory was kicked off by Mindy Evans of Morgantown. She was lively, entertaining and her writing was very well delivered. Her performance was a great way to start an evening of entertainment.

Two featured speakers were on the schedule to follow after an intermission. The first was Margaret Booth Baddour of Goldsboro. Margaret primarily read from her new book Scheherazade, wonderfully weaving our common human emotions into a rich tapestry of elegant experiences and drawing comparisons between our own lives and that of great ancient fables. She also read from other of her writings and demonstrated different styles of poetry.



The night was concluded by Jessie Carty from Charlotte, who read from her new collection At the A and P Meridiem, a beautiful connection of seemingly isolated events happening to seeming isolated people with the revelation that we are all bound together by these very events and this very sense of isolation. Jessie also videotapes the readings at Poetry Alive and the images from June’s meeting can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfXWeH4rXgg


What a wonderful way to spend an evening ANYwhere - this is one of the great reasons to come to Hickory on the second Tuesday of every month! But at any time, the TASTE FULL BEANS COFFEE SHOP is a the place to be - they have art all the time and bagels, coffee, muffins, chocolate biscottes to dip in your coffee, and cookies and even more - yea! Come to Hickory, and stop at the the Taste Full Beans where you can find Art, Coffee and Poetry!

(This photo will enlarge if clicked on)

Bright Eyes

I loved the light
that I saw in his eyes.
It came from another world
and It showed the way to
enter a place
beyond my wildest dreams.

I had never seen
a light that bright,
it changed my life because,
I thought that I had seen it all -
then he showed me how to slip away
and enter a brand new world.

I followed him, took care of him
and fed and combed and pampered him.
I waited on his every whim and bathed and
played, and chased after him.
Now at last, I can proudly say -
I’ve become his fondest pet!

Hickory Alive

Hickory Alive. The Extraordinares played 2009.0710Fr

Marah in Fireman's Kitchen in Hickory, NC

Roaches, termites and bats fled Hickory, NC, in panic tonight as the band Marah cleansed the city with seismological vibrations from the Fireman’s Kitchen. The performance featured the powerfully over-boosted throb of debonaire Johnny Pisano on bass, sweet nuances from electric Christine Smith on Rolaids Machine, accordion and harmonica, and discouraging words about the city of Hickory from wispy Dave Bielanko on guitar, banjo, stomp, grimace and vocal as the group (minus a couple of their regulars) wends it way through the great music capitals of the world, coming from Raleigh into Hickory en-route to Charlotte.


Bielanko sang some wonderfully memorable songs such as “I Suppose We Will Get Through This”, “I Think I Am Going Deaf”, “Sometimes This Happens to All Bands”, “Get Off My Stage I’m Doing a Gig”, and “Well, We Will Try to Do a Performance Anyway”. The 40 some odd members of the audience responded politely. He also chastised Farrah Fawcett for dying the same day as Michael Jackson with some crude remarks which he later said he should retract.

It was clear that the performance was well received by those present, and the presentation by Pisano was excellent. Bielanko was kaleidoscopic and Christine Smith was versatile. I enjoyed the show and hated to see it end even though they actually played for a little over an hour.

The French Nose

Is there really such a thing? if so - it is allegedly Pinocchio-like. It seems to have a Romanesque beginning, up between the eyes, but then it turns a bit up at the end. Then there is often a little "lip" on the nostrils to give them a slight flare a bit like a petticoat-flounce.

And if there really is a French Nose, it is probably due to smelling all those smells that are so familiar to most Americans and other Europeans, that of ham, sausage, cheese and so on - except that French version of these items all seem to have a slightly "gamey" odor to them - like they "almost" smell good, but you can't really be sure. I think my nose has also began to change a little during this trip. The nostrils are more alert than they were when I left.

And by the way, trying to write and sketch on subways requires skills that I have not developed.

Two Lovers at Footcandle

The Footcandle Film Society of Hickory showed Two Lovers as its June presentation at the Carolina Theater on June 11, 2009. After the showing of these movies, the members of the audience who wish to do so, share ideas about the film and tell how they felt about it, and discuss items such as acting, photography, directing, props, costumes, and more, sometimes a lot more.

This movie left me a little bit cold because I felt that the writer (or director) had to take over too much of the plot and make too many inputs to make the beginning get all the way to the end of the movie. In a good movie, the actors in playing the role of their characters, give the impression of taking over the story and making it all happen. It did have a happy ending, but that is only because the movie ended on a happy moment. What will happen next to those poor characters has got to be bad for everybody involved.

I loved the background photography. There was really good, solid, intuitive composition on most of the scenes in which the actors carried on stationary conversations with each other, and the constant excellent blending of colors by the photographers showed they had planned the scenes carefully and set up beautiful and artistic backgrounds to highlight the flow of action.

Pretend

At the store today I noticed a good-looking, slim baguette of bread. I squeezed it and it felt good. I turned it over and read on the back "French Parisian Bread". Since I had just returned from Paris, I couldn't put the loaf of bread back down again and it wound up in my pushcart.

We ate a lot of French bread in Paris. We ate as much of it as we could. They don't really call it "French Bread" over there, just baguette, but baguettes are all over the place. The best part is that they aren't standardized. No McDonaldization in France! There are bakeries all over the place, every other corner seems to have one, and they all have a slightly different taste. So you can't just have a bite of "French Bread", mark it off on your "France Travel" checklist and go on to the next requirement. No. You have to eat them all. Each one is better than the one before it. The one you are currently eating is always aspiring to fulfill the promises of the one you ate just before it. As delicious as a symphony would be if you could ever actually taste a symphony, full of melodies and rhythms, and counterpoints and when eaten with butter and jam or tapenadas or bits of ham or odoriferous cheeses they resonate with the mellowness of piano and strings and pique with the richness of horn and depth of drums. So I carried home my prize. Just because you have to be separated from the City of Light doesn't mean you have to be separated from its wonderful bread.

When I got home, I ate a small piece of my new bread. A little Dijon mustard was spread on a lightly toasted side of bread after being passed over with cut garlic, then a slice of pepperoni was added and some white vinegar sprinkled on. Then it was all covered with a thin slice of Irish cheese, lightly dusted with oregano flakes and replaced in the oven to all melt together. It was delicious.

Was it as good as the bread I had just eaten in Paris? Yes, yes! Well, it was almost as good. This is where the Pretend comes in. Don't snicker now, Pretend is important. You can use it for a lot more than just bread. To a writer, Pretend IS the bread of life. It is the raison d'etre for dreaming, It finds the richness concealed in the ordinary mess of life. Pretend discovers the hidden jewel that no one else could find. It is the sunlight which brightens sorrow, the happy companion to disappointment, it can reveal the unknown level which is hidden even above happiness, and it can take mediocrity and cover it all over with wonderful memories. To be able to Pretend is to have great power and if you can't Pretend, then you can always play like you can! Yum.

'Moan Dads

"Come on Crawdads, let's go!"

When was the last time you heard a grown man say words like this with heartfelt enthusiasm? For me it was the bottom of the seventh inning at Frans Stadium in Hickory as the Hickory Crawdads came to bat trailing the Hagerstown Suns 6 to 4.

Our first visit to the home of the 'Dads was enjoyable. Temperature was in the low 80's and humidity in the low 50's. A beautiful blue sky finally sketched a thin line of clouds across the sky just in time to turn purple, pink, red and a little yellow to melt into the denim-blue shadow of the Earth.

There have been some changes in the old pastime over the years. Back in the days of my youth, you would get to know the stranger who was sitting within talking distance of you in almost every baseball game. At first one of you might just comment on an unusual play, then that would expand to other comments, soon to embrace other members of the ball park who were sitting nearby. Well, baseball, indeed IS a game of inches, and it doesn't really begin to jell until sometime around the seventh inning. Like a sculpture, it is built, piece by piece, turn by turn, slice by slice. Knowledgeable fans, back in those good old days, would follow every pitch, anticipating the order and effect. "OK, now - last times Jones was up he struck-out on a high, inside pitch". You might pass this on to one of your new friends sitting near you. He might respond "Yeah. look for a slider on the outside corner to start with, then come back inside and low - back him off the plate and THEN come in with a fast ball low in the zone!" One of your other new friends might add "And then go outside for a setup and come back with the old sucker pitch!" (Sucker pitch being a high, inside pitch). And you would intently watch, approving as the catcher and pitcher followed your common knowledge, and groaning when they failed. And you would hang on every pitch, mentally motioning outfielders left and right as the pitch order changed. It was very much like a game of bridge or chess.

Well, those days are gone. Now loud music blasts in from loudspeakers as soon as each pitch is completed. It swells, and the crowd may clap, then instantly all falls silent as the pitcher begins his windup. Between innings, instead of getting to know your new friends, now there are clowns staggering around trying to pretend they are doing stupid things like falling down or chasing groundskeepers, and all this with more music beat and comments from the PA system.

So the new game seems not so much a sport involving a complex of performing and comprehending skills as it is a presentation of purposefully inept spoof. But then, that is America, the place where the real tradition is always change.

Note

NOTE: Travel comments previously posted to "Celebration" have been moved to "Pathways" which can be found at
http://adventuresinexploration.blogspot.com/

Titanic at Hickory Community Theatre

A lot of things went well with this presentation. The set, the costumes, the makeup was good, and there was some really nice and compelling acting that took place several places in the play. Unfortunately, the singing always started back up again.

So it became a kind of a game. The actors pretended that they were singing OK, and you pretended that it really didn't sound too bad, and you would hang on through the awkward parts and pretend that you were enjoying the play except that something with the audio system also didn’t work well. It was too loud at times and too soft sometimes, and it distorted too much.

From my point of view there were too many stories told, many of which didn’t get a chance to come across because of time constraints, and you didn’t want to hear some of them sung so badly. Creating believable and interesting characters requires a little nuance - you can't just come out and say what this person is and go on to the next character like cutting out paper dolls. Compare this with “Doubt” in which the four stories weren’t really told at all and you had to piece them together, detective-like, from hints that were carefully dropped. Compare this also with “The Producers” in which all the actors were shamelessly having fun - and so was the audience. But in this story, what was trying to be told was how totally the world was changing from the days of antiquity into an exciting new world. It didn't really work for me because the stories seemed too fragmentary.

A musical with 40-some actors is a significantly complicated challenge for almost any community. If there had been a good "screen play" written for this musical, and it had been acted out instead of sung - with a little bit of singing in the background from time to time by an unseen (or partly seen - like the orchestra was) group of people who could sing well and carry the narrative- and segue from acting into singing - I think it could have been a knockout.

Reflections - Wali

Looking back upon his life, our dog Wali celebrates his fifteenth birthday.

The name "Wali" (waal-LEE) is a transliteration of an Arabic word meaning "protective friend", and that is exactly what Wali has been. He came into our life as a puppy when we lived up on a breezy ridge, high in the Blue Ridge Mountains, well out in those great forests. We were overrun with stray dogs that pillaged our compost, attacked our garden, chased our cat and cowered our other two dogs, who both weighed about eighty-five pounds. Wali put an end to all that in the first month he was with us. By then he was beginning to approach fifteen pounds (on the way to his eventual sixty-one). But he was fearless. And fast. And loud. Now we live in a small city and his life has become quiet. He can hardly hear anything now, and doesn't see very well either, and is down to about forty pounds, once again a smallish dog with great paws and a large head. But his life is still full because he is a dog of light who reflects great events and great moments. And even today you can see him sitting there on his old rocky ridge. He spends a lot of time there now, intently watching all the gleaming lights from the forests beneath him, listening to the sounds of his own land and smelling worlds that we humans will never even know about. He is clearly master of all he surveys, and is quite at home, reflecting on his own very special universe.

Welcome to the Big 1-5. Happy birthday, Wali.

"Moonlight and Magnolias" in Hickory, NC, at the Fireman's Kitchen, HCT

Bill Boyd on the left as Victor Fleming and Anthony Liguori playing David Selznick, take a truer than life run at the wickedly-wild world of Hollywood. Fiction always does get a lot more truth out than the most sober and consciousness meticulation can ever produce and this play is a great example of how that takes place.

I won’t go through the plot because that would strip the impact of the actors from the play, let’s just say that they they took a clearly implausible story, breathed life into it and created an enjoyable work of art.

Bob Smith as Ben Hecht and Connie Bools as MIss Poppenghul rounded out the cast. Hechct was the key character in the play as he wove a mixture of Jewish-Southern-New York innuendic folklore into the story of a book he had never read. Fortunately he had a LOT of help in understanding the screen play he wound up writing.

I was attracted to the Fleming character. He reminded me of some people I had known in the upper echelons of state government when I worked in Tallahassee. The Selznick and Heckt guys were sometimes pretty good, and the Poppenghul character was faithful to her role. The bananas and peanuts were weirdy-weird though, and the Jew-boy thing got off message and wandered badly - I kept thinking it would be woven into the story somehow and would provide an ultimate meaning, bringing some new light of understanding on the Civil War. Instead, it got forgotten - and that's not good writing. AND the pop-corn popper hanging on the wall WAS NEVER USED!!! - That is awesomely bad theatre!

Boyd and Liguori showed how life can be lived, way out there at the end of the world of reason, when the only hope you have left is that desperate promise of the greatest glory on earth. They also showed how ordinary these people can be who aspire to that perch - and how awful those wonderful jobs might really have been.

Clearly the most memorable part of the movie “Gone With the Wind” was Rhett Butler telling Scarlett O’Hara that he frankly didn’t “give a damn”. I remember back some sixty-two years ago hearing those lines in a movie theater in Vicksburg, Mississippi, and that genteel audience gasped "UHHHHHH!" in shock at those awful words. Well! Ron Hutchinson, who wrote this screen play, crowned that great quote by going even better than that. What was it? Heh-heh. You will be amazed!

Springtime in Hickory

This entry moved to The Dancing Trail blog. http://thedancingtrail.blogspot.com/2009/04/springtime-in-hickory.html

Poetry Alive with Ted Pope

Ted Pope took the Taste Full Beans Coffeehouse by storm Tuesday night, and when he was through reading, the place looked like a storm HAD hit. Paper was strewn all around the stage and lectern area and the audience was wide-eyed in amazement and holding on to their tables for dear life.

It was quite a show by a real showman. Even when the dreaded cappuccino machine cut loose with its randomly-awarded raspberry, Pope instantly incorporated THAT into the poem he was reciting at the moment as if he had practiced the timing of those events for a month, and had gotten it down perfectly!

How good WAS it? Well, I’m not a poet so I dare not venture into that web, but I can say that the first sheet of paper Pope wadded up and threw to the floor was very dramatic. Particularly since it struck the right note in the thought that was also then being delivered. And the next two or three added to the first event almost like visual and background alliteration. But then it became more like consonation and finally assonation, and eventually it was . . . well, I have a two-year old granddaughter and she started to come to my mind.

Also, Pope had no problem with stage presence or getting the audience’s attention. But I did sense a problem with the audience understanding who he really is because we saw only one part of Pope. The game face part. Now Elvis comes to mind. Here was a guy who could romp and stomp with the roughest and toughest, but sometimes Elvis would also coo a tender love song that caused young ladies to actually die right in their chairs, and he would also occasionally spin out an ancient lullaby that would bring tears to the eyes of old women. Then he was back on the stage again rockin’ and sockin’ and stompin’ and rompin’ and air-copulatin’ and sweatin’ and spinning’.

That’s why I wanted to speak to Ted after it was over. And when I did, I saw a nice guy with great talent. It is my feeling that if he could show a deeper side of his personality, if only for one poem, that it would enhance his performance immensely. If you get a chance to see Ted Pope, don’t miss it. You'll probably see me there too.

Prolepsis

Shadows cast by coming events. More to the point, intuitive awareness or those shadows before they are even noticed.

This is an early heads-up about a book that will change the world. New book? Of course. Actually it was first published in 1980, its eleventh version in 2002. It was written by a man who walked, and still walks the same earth as all the rest of us do. Just like Charles Darwin who saw nothing that anyone else had never seen before, but like Darwin, the writer of this book didn’t understand what everyone else understood. Darwin asked questions that no one else had ever asked before. And since these questions had never been asked before, there were no answers. He had to figure them out for himself.

So too this book which is called “The Nature of Order”, walks over familiar ground, sees all those things that we all know, but it asks the questions that we never thought of asking. We all have wondered about them - but we never asked them. And we never tried to answer them.

Christopher Alexander has actively lived in our commonly shared world of wonder for a long time. He was the driving force behind the great book which he co-authored called “The Pattern Language”, which has always seemed sufficient unto itself - until now. But that book was basically a statement of axioms which he had discovered and organized. This new book is a discussion of how those “axioms” came to be, how they work, how they are organized and how their fundamental composition can be used by us to shape a new world in which we might someday live and work.

I have read 88 pages of the first volume which is titled “The Phenomenon of Life”. Not always easy reading. Alexander is an architect, not a writer. He repeats a lot, but he has a lot to say. This first volume is some 475 pages, and is followed by volume two, “The Process of Creating LIfe”; volume three, “A Vision of a Living World”; and volume four, “The Luminous Ground”. And the books are expensive. What was he thinking?

Well, the book is not for everyone. I put the “Nature of Order” on my Blogspot page and found a grand total of nine people in the world who have also done that. I have corresponded with one or two. Strange people they are. Not like me. But interesting.

Prolepsis. Just so you will know.

Requiem for a Rassler?

A sad movie, from my point of view, which showed America slipping under an imaginary boundary separating "second-world" from "third-world" nation. It seemed to me a brutal story terribly told of trapped and tortured animals of the homo sapiens species, although not quite human in some awful sense. Strippers, on the one hand who only resembled human females in physical form but who were denied expression of the defining traits of femininity. On the other end of this tale are the "wrestlers", far removed from their Grecian prototypes and far also removed from the gestalt of human correspondence, retaining only that vestige visited occasionally by the normal male of "good-ole boy" bondage. Their common bond being their willingness to permit their "friends" to savagely and excessively rip their bodies apart for the amusement of their "fans". Once out of the glitter of the performing stage, these pitiful creatures were blown by the winds of winter along frozen landscapes decorated with destroyed buildings and decrepit trailer parks through a world which held them in smug contempt. All this for those few moments when they performed for their clearly emotionally-deformed admirers. Perhaps the worst part of it all was the premise that these gifts of life are being passed not from a Great Creator to an Adam-creature as seen in Michelango's great work and who can now commence on his own volition, but from a detritus of human wreckage left by a society which had collapsed and are "awarded" as a finger might point to the blame.

The real story of this movie, for me at least, is a call to examine our own lives to see how much we too strive to honor principles and serve masters who seek our souls and our humanity.

Academia Nut?

Went to Lenoir-Rhyne University today to see a photo exhibition. It was in the Visual Arts Center (VAC) which is listed as being on 8th Avenue NE, but really isn’t there at all. There are no signs on 8th Avenue to show its presence, and none of the five people (students?) I asked on 8th Avenue knew where it was. It was supposed to be at 643 and 1/2 on the avenue and there was 653 and the building next to it was 633 and nothing in between except a maintenance shop which was well back off the street. Turns out the VAC is behind the maintenance shop. Once there I found five parking spaces. They were all taken, of course.

Well, once in the VAC, which seems to be basically a converted construction shed, there were about 60 or 65 photographs displayed on walls. The pictures were black-matted on white paper and covered with cellophane-type material. Many of them appeared to be about 6X8 or 8X10 inches. A few were a little larger.

Two of the pictures were nice and two others were interesting. There was a lot of trouble with darkness in the pictures and only one or two were completely in focus. That’s not a big problem for me, but I do try to keep the out-of-focus parts in the background and not the subject as was often the case here. Colors seemed kind of jarring with lots of improvisation and not much harmony, saturation was completely missing. Tones were not usually organized and a lot of the photos were hung up in the two, three, four zonal range. There was no composition or even use of design elements, no stories were told. The only emotions emerging from the display were faint whiffs of puzzlement. Snacks were offered and “Barefoot” wine was available. The wine accompanied the photographs very well and the munchies were eleganté.

Well, I haven’t mentioned the photographer’s name and I won’t. The whole thing seemed so bizarre, especially with all these obviously well-educated people standing there, peering intently at the photographs, thoughtfully munching their goodies and knowingly sipping their wine, I felt like I had gone terribly wrong and missed the entire message. So I walked outside and came back in again. That didn’t help.

Everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves in a vacuous kind of way. I felt left out. Some of them actually seemed to be floating there in front of the photos. I guess it is just an academia thing.

There IS such a thing as photographic art. And one of the things any artist learns early in that game is to show ONLY your very best work.

2nd South Carolina String Band in Hickory

To the Catawba Science Center auditorium to watch a performance by the “2nd South Carolina String Band” as they played music from the American Civil War period.


Stories were told and background information provided that made the music even more interesting. They talked about how Stephen Foster was going to name his great epic “The Pee Dee” instead of “Swaunee”, and his producer was the one who supposedly came up with the name change, although there is no official hook anywhere upon which to hang that allegation.

The auditorium was perhaps one-third filled and occasionally the crowd joined in clapping and singing. There was a lot of toe-tapping and head-bobbing throughout.

“The Ministral Boy to the War Has Gone” by flutist Greg Hernandez was a show stopper, but the biggest hit of the day was the finale, “Dixie” which was played by the entire ensemble standing and sung by the entire audience who were also standing. The band has a significant presence on the web. Just Google "2nd South Carolina String Band" or begin at http://www.civilwarband.com/about.shtml

Later to a “baseball” contest in which Lenoir-Rhyne University was easily out-played by the Mars Hill College team. We saw the first four innings of the last game, the second double-header played in two days. LRU lost all four games at home 22-13, 8-5, 13-9 and 14-3. We accidentally set in the Mars Hill fan section, and they seemed like nice people. (Easy to seem nice with a weekend like that!) We enjoyed the parched peanuts http://web.mac.com/fauxtaographer/iWeb/Blue%20Mountain%20Kitchen/Dips%20%26%20Fancies.html we had fired up for the occasion.