Moses Cone Manor, NC

Moses Cone Manor is on the Blue Ridge Parkway around mile marker 294, on the northern edge of Blowing Rock, NC. The manor is a 20 room house on a 3,500 acre estate. But there is a lot more than just that - see http://www.brptrails.com/brp2940.htm and also http://www.virtualblueridge.com/parkway_tour/parks/293_0/
for more details. The house is modestly beautiful and so is the view from the front porch. It became part of the Park Service in 1949.








Inside are sales of art and crafts from this region. It is a fine place to find a special and different kind of gift for someone important to you





There are some 25 miles of trails including those for hiking, horseback riding and riding horse-drawn carriages. Trails wind across sun-drenched meadows, and through mountain forests. There are lakes on the estate, including Trout Lake and Bass Lake (pictured here). The grave site of Cone, his wife and a sister are in the edge of a great meadow. There are apples galore. Cone planted some 30,000 to 40,000 apple trees, including 75 species.

© John Womack, 2008. All rights reserved.

Valdese, NC Hmong Festival

The Hmong (MOWng) people are an ethnic group generally located in southern China. Large concentrations are also found in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. During the American War against Vietnam, some Hmong were recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States to attack North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces in Vietnam and Laos. Many Hmong fighters were teen-agers and preteens. When America was forced to abandon the war, large numbers of Hmong fled into Thailand and other countries. Approximately 275,000 were brought to the United States. A small number now live in Valdese, a town of about 4,500 people twenty miles west of Hickory, North Carolina.

The Valdese Hmong have begun a yearly festival. Their First Annual Festival was held this year on Sept 20, at the Old Rock School in Valdese and featured traditional Hmong costumes, singing, dancing, art and sports events. I wanted to attend because I was somewhat familiar with the Hmong from my experiences in the American war against Vietnam in which I directed hundreds of B-52 bombing missions into many areas containing Hmong people. When their leader, Vang Pao was airlifted out to the United States, the Hmong were left to face the victorious communist forces and many were massacred. Many other Hmong died in the “killing fields” of Pol Pot.

I was interested to see what the passage of a mere thirty years might have done for these people who, after all, trace their continued existence as a separate group for almost 3.000 years? Remember that they not only crossed a great ocean and traveled to the other side of the globe but also traveled from a jungle/agrarian lifestyle to a modern technological environment. What would we find? We enjoyed some of the music (some was weird!) and all of the dancing was enjoyable. It was very interesting to notice the extremely intricate hand movements used the by women dancers and to contrast that with their very simple foot movements. The craftwork was nice and original and the food was simple, inexpensive and delicious.

© John Womack, 2008. All rights reserved.

Hickory Art Crawl

Thursday afternoon and night seems a slightly off time for this type of action. Yet it appeared to be pretty well attended.


The lage parking area between the main square and the station was filled with cars, and the downtown was busy with shoppers.




Table 220 was had diners both outside and inside and live music was performed inside the restaurant, and the music could be heard outside nearby. Clearly there was room for a lot more music.











The stores that were participating in the crawl had art work on the sidewalk and more art could be seen right inside the door .

Some of the artists were attending their presentation, graciously answering questions and talking about their work. Lawrence Rice was one of the most prominent with his display of Aviation Art. www.riceart.net.

Snacks were available in several of the venues, along with wine offerings.

Clearly the main action was taking place at Taste Full Beans Coffeeshop where Joe Clayton Young was talking about some of his interesting photos. One of the big questions had to be “How do you get all these people to relax and act so normal when you are making their pictures?” I tried to talk with him but he seemed to spend a good bit of the evening talking with another gentleman who had a camera around his neck.



Island Style was not participating in the crawl but its distinctive art was hard to pass up. and a nearby store showed a preview of coming attractions. Hmmmm. I wonder if they meant Halloween or the election!

© John Womack, 2008. All rights reserved.

Hickory Museum of Art

Remember: Most pictures will enlarge if clicked upon.


Outside the art gallery was a busy place to be. Besides an energetic Blue Grass band in front of the entrance, there were outdoor mobiles, dancers, ice cream and sandwich wraps, and a petting zoo. The zoo featured dog-sized ponies, and slightly smaller goats and lambs plus a leghorn chicken, delighted children, puzzled parents and exhausted volunteers.



Above the petting zoo the eastern wing of the museum towered decorated with advertisements, and looking toward its left you can see the main entrance with the band in front and the refreshments are out of sight farther to the left. According to "AreaGuides.net>Hickory", it is "One of the oldest art museums in North Carolina, the Hickory Museum of Art displays a superb collection of American art, with a featured holding of landscapes from Thomas Cole and other painters of the Hudson River School tradition. Other areas of focus within the museum include pieces of contemporary folk and outsider art from the South, clay works from North Carolinian artists and studio art glass." More information at http://www.hickorymuseumofart.org/home.php



One of the exhibitions on September 13, 2008, Doug Marlette. Doug is best know for his cartoons, but he is also a writer. Very well known to some of us of course, as the cartoonist for the Tallahassee Democrat newspaper before he made it big-time. He is a native North Carolinian, but for some reason he went to Florida State University for his degree. Where he got attracted to kudzu is not known to me although he obviously had been familiar with it all his life.

The main exhibition right now is a commemoration of the amazing Black Mountain College.


What happens when John Dewey's educational philosophy is taken to extreme? Wow! Black Mountain College. Not for everybody, or even most people, and never more than just a blip on the world's education glacier, still it changed the direction of that glacier by infecting the world's leading artists, poets, writers, philosophers, scientists, architects, and a whole lot more with the academic disease called imagination.


The college was only in existence for a short 24 years and fewer than 1,200 students ever attended it and only 60 total ever graduated and the college closed forever 51 years ago. But the names of its students and teachers read like a list of the leaders of mankind's intellectual explorers. http://www.bmcproject.org/ The walls of the museum are now filled with photographs and paintings of those who attended or taught at Black Mountain College such as Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Robert Rauschenberg, Josef and Anni Albers, Jacob Lawrence, Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Cy Twombly, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Arthur Penn, Buckminster Fuller, along with many other BMC students and teachers.



The Hickory Museum of Art has done a very good job of presenting the Spirit of Black Mountain College in this exhibition.

Hickory Riverfront Festival

Sixth annual gathering at the river by the citizens of Hickory. We humans were not alone either. There were owls and hawks and snakes and specialists who knew what was going on around the local area.

There were presentations on birding practices and hiking trails and greenways, although the mythical Hickory Greenway still has not been found. Even the people at this presentation weren't sure, although they informed me that it was nearby - in fact some 3/10 of a mile of the Greenway is right here at the park. Where the rest of it is - well, we still don't know. Nobody was sure although we saw three signs while driving home that read "Greenway" with an arrow pointing. But we've been there in the past and there is no greenway there.


Another bluegrass band was playing here too. "Bluegrass" is heard everywhere around here but they don't play "bluegrass" music for some reason - they play a form of calm, slightly upscale country music. Probably that's because they really only know Country Music, but that has degenerated so badly over the past 30 years that nobody really wants to hear it anymore. So they play something and call it "Bluegrass".


All in all, it was a nice day. Weather was warm but with a bright blue sky and a cooling breeze. Some canoeing and fishing brought us all back to the river, and made for a pleasant visit.

Hickory Community Theatre

The moon rises over Hickory as the community theatre prepares to present its rendition of "The Producers". The story is well known so the enjoyment of the presentation is the local flair, the local actors who play the part of great fictional beings.


It was very well done. Exciting, fast, always flowing just a step or two ahead of the audience, most of whom were busy savoring the part just finished - then suddenly aware that another great moment is already under way.


And the main thing we took home with us from the presentation was the sense of fun. It was fun to see and obviously it was fun for the actors to show it to us. And there is also the realization that this theatre is one of the four groups presenting plays in Hickory. In fact, tonight the Green Room Community Theatre is also presenting "Oklahoma" at the Civic and Performance Place.

Poetry Reading

Tonight at the Taste Full Beans Coffeehouse in downtown Hickory, NC. The main readers were Helen Losse, editor of The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, and John Amen.

There were about 30 people attending in a late arriving crowd. Losse was OK, good and enjoyable, but her presentation was quiet and it was hard to tell when she had finished reading a poem. In fact applause was sporadic and faltering because we wern't sure if we should applaud yet. After Losse read there was an intermission.

I almost left at that point because I felt like I had intruded into a closed group. No one had welcomed me or even talked with me except for one person whom I later found was not even a member himself. The regular attendees seemed to be ignoring me, or any newcomers including the guy running the meeting. No one even spoke to me or responded to my own comments. Talk about a closed clique! Very unimpressive and sub-marginal. Then the one person who did talk with me turned out to be the second reader of the evening, John Amen.



Amen was good - even spectacular. Talk about knowing how to present poetry - here was a master at work. He used body postures, facial expressions and accent changes. He also had a guitar and proved that he knows how to use it well. His presentation left me wondering what kind of a life he has lead and how he would learn so damn much about life. But then, that's where the good poets fly - way out yonder - not so much living, really as it is in sensing, feeling, using intuition, and just plain awareness. The art of poetry is the art of describing what eyes can't really see and hearing what ears always fail to notice - the art of feeling beyond what is presented to you. We all understand it when we encounter it from a master, and we always walk through a slightly different world for the next several days. That is why we need to encounter really good poets like John Amen on a constant basis.

Farmers' Market

Bustling, busy, bargains everywhere and all kinds of glorious goodies. One thing you can ALWAYS count on at the farmers' markets all over everywhere is to expect surprises. You are always surprised at what they don't have - just sold out of - and then there are the other surprises that you really weren't looking for. Some of which you will buy - if you are even a little bit like me. The markets are usually hot and sweaty and they bring together city slickers and country folks and they both put on a little show for each other as they buy and sell the glorious goodies.



The market in Hickory, NC, is right downtown, in the main city square, backed up by the Armory and the railroad tracks, and it opens to the heart of the city.

Lenoir Sculpture Fair 2008 and Grape Stomp in Vale, NC

Lenoir, NC held their 23rd annual sculpture exhibition in Broyhill Park on September 6, 2008. The winning entry is placed on permanent display in downtown Lenoir, and the small town is probably the best adorned city in all of North Carolina.









One of the exhibitors in this show was Victor Raul, my old neighbor in Franklin, and owner of his own sculpture studio, "Copper Creations" in Franklin. One of the sculptures he entered was this stork.








This is my second year to attend this sculpture and I highly recommend it. Some 200 + pieces of sculpture are on display along with their artists and there is lots of music (ranging from bluegrass to classical) provided by local groups and schools. This is a good show. Lots to photograph, and a really nice place to shoot some video.

We also attended a "Grape Stomp" at WoodMill Winery in Vale, NC. Highly touted in papers, and well attended. My recommendation is to pass it by and call yourself lucky. It was worse than a total flop. A total flop would have been sufferable; this was offal awful.



Probably a thousand people turned out and they were ALL miserable. Hot, no shade, stunk of sour grapes, the "stomp" was a pathetic joke and there was no real music or good food but lots of EXTREMELY loud amplified noise. Plus the place is hard to find, way out on back roads and very poorly marked.

SETI & Shostak

The presentation by Shostak was very good. He speaks fast - words run together - he is quirky, sharp and surprising. No wonder Larry King seems to like him, and he has run two or three specials on Nova. He seems to put a lot of confidence in Artificial Intelligence, and apparently believes it will be the way we will make "contact" with other life. He indicated that would take place within the next 24 years, but apparently it will not be a give-and-take thing since the round-trip between comments will take enormous numbers of years. Part of his humor was reflected when he referred to the evolution of mankind being largely ". . . a genetic experiment being run by women".


During the question-and-answer period, I asked him what we needed to know about the "electric banana" and he obviously took great delight in explaining the story behind that. He also referred us to the http://www.seti.org/.


There were SETI things going on in downtown Hickory all day, and a lot of Klingon-ears were in evidence at the performance, as well as several "authentic" SETIs. The audience seemed to be a mixture of True Believers, college professors and students, members of the Catawba Valley Astronomy Club, and just curious people - probably about 80 in all. Afterwards there was a snack line, then a showing of the film "SETI" in the planetarium.





The Arts Center had several other presentations in progress, one of which was a photo exhibition of the high-speed work done by Harold Edgerton, an MIT professor who made photographs of playing cards being severed by bullets, with both severed parts of the card and the bullet still in the frame. Also droplets of water, and other amazing pictures of a world beyond normal comprehension. Great photos even today, but they were stunning when he made them back in the 1930s and 1940s. The exhibition had come from Wolfsberg in Austria to MIT in Boston, and on to the Art Center in Hickory where it had been for the past four months and Sunday night was the last night it was open here. It is permanently located in Wolfsberg, Austria. For more information, check out http://www.2fast4u.ipressl.at/

Springtime In the Smokies

Just back from a quick trip to the humidor of the south, Florida - the place where the people feed their bugs and the rain doesn't fall to the ground, but floats around all day long. Back again to the mountains of the south, those islands that rise up into the southern skies. Still breezy, cool and bare up here - trees still have no leaves. But wait - look closely and you see a bud or two. Go get your camera, and be amazed. Watch the springtime leap out of the ground!

It's not well known but maple trees can actually attack. Here is a beautiful example. I shot this same shot in the autumn because it was so pretty then. So - what to do?




This is our front yard! Amazing isn't it. My wife planted these beauties several years ago and they just get carried away more and more every year. They are under our peach tree which is also blooming and just in front of the lilac which is getting ready to explode - so get your pictures and get away quickly!




This is one of our neighbors yards. We have a lot of them that look very similar to this. You won't believe how hard it is to drive. I mean with a camera in one hand and a video camcorder in the other.



This is easier. I made it sitting in the swing on our deck. Our pretty cherry tree anchors one end of the grapevine and also overlooks a wren house. Great place to live, right? I mean, if you are a bird. Or a person.



Another neighbors place. Hard to drive on these roads in the springtime or the autumn. Main thing is to stay out of the ditches. They are just full of cars this time of the year. (Floridans, mostly)




And the big trees are starting to get with it too. Can you imagine how much energy it takes to blast out all these leaves on this great big tree? Now multiply that energy by 4,000,000,000,000, to the 12th power for all the trees in the Smokies! Wow!
Well - I like the autumn in the mountains and my wife likes the springtime. I just don't know. What do you think, Kat, Janie, and Juliana? I need help!