by David Burn | Apr 6, 2005 | Literature
In a post titled, “What is Real?”, Evelyn Rodriguez says, “I’d rather be real than great. I have never gained anything I truly wanted from a pure pursuit of greatness. I’m not saying these two are mutually exclusive, but the focus can lead one astray. Nothing kills relationships – personal and professional – quicker than when I stop being real. It’s costly in the tangible cash realm too.”
She goes on to quote a few lines from this William Stafford poem.
Ask Me
Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life. Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.
I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait. We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.
Rodriguez’s quest for real is refreshing and brave.
Stafford’s poem is an icy cold splash of clean Oregon water.
Being real is dangerous work. People are frightened by real and frightened people are often dangerous people. I know. I’ve had a gun pulled on me by a frightened person. I’ve also been fired from my job by more than one frightened boss. So, I applaud and support the desire to live one’s truth, whatever it may be. It’s never easy, but for those inclined to forge such a path, living falsely is to inhabit even more treacherous terrain.
by David Burn | Apr 1, 2005 | Music
Derek Trucks Band
Derek Trucks was born to jam. He’s been so good for so long, it can, at times, be hard to hear the progress he’s making as an artist. But we heard it on Friday night at the Trustees Theater in Savannah. I have to admit, when he first changed his lineup, sending bluesman Bill McKay packing, I was aprehensive. Now the clarity of Derek’s vision is plain to see. With the addition of Kofi Burbridge on keys, flute and vocals and Mike Mattison on lead vocals, DTB is the premier jazz/soul/funk/Latin act on the scene today. The musicianship of the five players is simply at a higher level than one normally encounters, even in bands that can be called great. The venue was a tad formal for my tastes. Any place that discourages dancing has to be questioned. But even on my ass, the spiritual sounds of DTB worked their magic.
by David Burn | Mar 31, 2005 | Music
Alec Wilkinson, frequent contributor to the New Yorker and author of A Violent Act, Moonshine Midnights and Big Sugar published a revealing piece last fall on one of my favorite musicians, Gillian Welch. Here’s a passage, rich with the kind of detail unique to a writer of substance:
Welch is tall and slender. She has a long narrow face, high cheekbones, wide-set eyes, sharp chin, and a toothy smile. She is thirty-six Her skin is pale, and her hair is fine an reddish-brown. Her carriage is upright, and her movements are unhurried and graceful—her shoulders swing slightly as she walks. She collects hymnals, and handmade shoeshine kits, the kind from which people once made a livin on the street. She is inclined toward practicality As a child, she played the piano and the drum but gave them up because she didn’t like being confined to whatever room the instruments were in. Onstage, during instrumental passages she bends her head over her guitar, like a figure in a religious painting, and plays with a ruthless rhythmic precision. There is a sense of self-possession about her that seems more a matter of temperament than influence. Welch is adopted. Her mother, Mitzie, who is a singer, says she is surprised that Welch became a performer, because performers, in her experience, always have a need to please, and her daughter doesn’t seem to.
Welch’s narratives tend to be accounts of resignation, misfortune, or torment. Her characters include itinerant laborers, solitary wanderers, misfits, poor people plagued at every turn by trouble, repentant figures, outlaws, criminals, soldiers, a moonshiner, a farm girl, a reckless beauty queen, a love-wrecked woman, a drug addict, and a child. Her imagination is sympathetic to outcasts who appeal for help to God despite knowing from experience that there isn’t likely to be any. Their theology is ardent and literal. They are given to picturing themselves meeting their families in Heaven, where mysteries too deep to comprehend will finally be explained. “Until we’ve all gone to Jesus / We can only wonder why,” she sings in “Annabelle,” a song about a sharecropper who hopes to give his daughter more than he had but who delivers her to the cemetery instead. A number of Welch’s songs are written from the point of view of male characters. “My Morphine,” the drowsy, intoxicated lament of a man whose addiction is souring, is the only song I am aware of about a narcotic which creates the sensation of having taken the narcotic. She is accomplished at compressing dramatic events into a few verses and a chorus. In “Caleb Meyer,” a man appears, transgresses, dies, and is revived as a spectre in the imagination of the woman who slit his throat in self-defense
I’m presently under a Welch-induced hypnosis, care of the lead track on her latest record, Soul Journey. “Look At Miss Ohio” is a song about a carefree young woman with a penchant for driving around Atlanta “with her ragtop down.” While her mother tries to force a wedding gown on her, she asserts she “wants to do right, but not right now.”
by David Burn | Mar 31, 2005 | Art
Andy Goldsworthy is one of the UK’s best-known artists. His extraordinary sculptures are made from natural materials with the minimum of technological intervention; if a work can be made by hand then it will be. Normally situated outdoors, often in rugged and inaccessible terrain, the pieces are left to be gradually eroded by wind, rain and the heat of the sun. The only long-term records of Goldsworthy’s major sculptures are the images that the artist produces documenting the works’ creation and erosion.
Goldsworthy is interested in the ‘movement, light, growth and decay’ of nature. He exploits its vital impermanence: changes in season, weather and terrain. The materials of Goldsworthy’s work are in turn affected by change; he employs such transitory elements as leaves, wood, rock, ice, snow, peat and sand. By necessity, then, the majority of the sculptures must be completed and documented in one day as light and temperature would affect their very materiality, their existence.
Thanks to Eyestorm for the above text, and to Thomas Riedelsheimer for his documentary, Rivers And Tides, which introduced me to this environmental artist.
by David Burn | Mar 27, 2005 | Architecture, Lowcountry
I’m generally underwhelmed by new construction. I could list a litany of reasons why, but a decided lack of quality craftsmanship, and thus character, are the leading causes.
However, as a new resident of South Carolina’s Lowcountry, my eyes are starting to open to the charms of new construction (done right). While Bluffton is a town rich in history, there are few structures that date to the 19th century or early 20th century. Neighboring Hilton Head Island has no such structures left standing that I’m aware of, as the island wasn’t opened to development until the 1950s. Therefore, new construction is the operative norm hereabouts. Some of it is slap-and-paste, as it is elsewhere in the country. But some of it is exceptional.
“When we build, let us think that we build forever. Let it not be for present delight nor for present use alone. Let it be such work as our descendants will thank us for; and let us think, as we lay stone on stone, that a time is to come when those stones will be held sacred because our hands have touched them, and that people will say, as they look upon the labor, ‘See! This our parents did for us.'” –John Ruskin
The above quotation is taken from Genesis Contruction’s web site, a local builder of fine quality homes. Ruskin was a noted art critic, Oxford professor and primary inspiration for the Arts & Crafts movement. The Arts and Crafts movement was part of the major English aesthetic movement of the last years of the 19th century, but in the United States the term is often used to denote the style of interior design that prevailed between the dominant eras of Art Nouveau and Art Deco, or roughly the period from 1910 to 1925.
A Genesis-built Lowcountry-style home on Spring Island, SC
Their are two styles of homes in the area that greatly appeal to me. One is the Charleston-style home, found in Westbury Park and Shell Hall. The other is the Lowcountry-style home found in Oldfield, Palmetto Bluff and other locations on- and off-plantation.
by David Burn | Mar 25, 2005 | Music
Widespread Panic is back. After a 15-month hiatus, the boys from Athens, GA took the stage at the venerable Fox Theatre in Atlanta last night to the roar of adoring fans. Out of the shoot, “Holden Oversoul” from the band’s first album, Space Wrangler.
The screen door to the farmer’s porch
To the back porch, to the backlands
It’s never left closed
Steve LaBate writing for Paste Magazine was there to capture the magic.
“Frontman John Bell’s voice is high, gritty, twisted, emotive—as if creeping on the breeze from some ghastly New Orleans boneyard. Gregg Allman in Robert Plant’s register. The Widespread singer has put on some pounds since I last saw him perform (at a breast cancer benefit in Athens) but he hasn’t lost a step.”
LaBate continues, “Widespread Panic is usually hailed for its loose jamming and die-hard fans, but I’ve always thought the group was underappreciated in the songwriting department.” I couldn’t agree more. In fact, here’s some of what I had to say in a piece I wrote a number of years ago on this very topic:
A crucial element to any band’s success (or lack thereof) is its ability to write songs with lyrics that embed themselves on a cellular level. This is an area where Grateful Dead–with two heavy weight poets on board–cleaned house. And now today, with new Jam Bands making it on a seemingly weekly basis, we must seek out and hold up new masters of the form. It’s my personal contention that the writing of Mikey Houser and John Bell is worthy of critical praise.
p.s. Spencer Sloan has a great photo spread on his blog. And check the comments–they’re hilarious and sad, depending on your mood and relationship to the band.
by David Burn | Mar 19, 2005 | Digital culture
Seth Godin points to a great article on “the long tail” by Wired editor-in-chief, Chris Anderson. The piece is available as a PDF from Change This, a site which Godin helped give birth to last summer.
So what is this long tail? I first heard the term a few months back, and like most things involving the web, there was no explanation, just the assumption that I knew, or that I cared enough to catch up to the conversation. The long tail, at least in terms of entertainment and media products, refers to the vast catalog of books, CDs and films that do not rank as best sellers, or even as profit-generators in the traditional distribution-via-retail model.
Anderson explains how bricks and mortar-less enterprises like Netflix, Amazon and iTunes make as much money by providing obscure titles as they do by providing hits.
With no shelf space to pay for and, in the case of purely digital services like iTunes, no manufacturing costs and hardly any distribution fees, a miss sold is just another sale, with the same margins as a hit. A hit and a miss are on equal economic footing, both just entries in a database called up on demand, both equally worthy of beeing carried. Suddenly, popularity no longer has a monopoly on profitability.
The uncovering of this new economic truth has several implications. As a writer, the point couldn’t be clearer that simply making one’s work available—especially with today’s print-on-demand self-publishing options—is the big push. For over a decade, I’ve gotten lost in the idea that to “make it as a writer,” I first had to convice editors at small literary presses to take notice of me. That’s the old model. The new model allows me to bypass the gatekeepers and go direct to my audience, especially if I have the ability to market myself, which I do.
Another implication that occurs to me as a music lover and internet entrepreneur is the power of successfully serving niche markets. How about an iTunes-style service (or a hybrid, where users are empowered to choose downloads or streaming) that specifically carries the music iTunes does not? Given my ties to, and history in, the jamband community, I can see such a service providing only live recordings, commonly known as “bootlegs,” although that definition is fast losing meaning in an era where bands increasingly encourage taping of their shows and peer-to-peer file sharing.
Because I know first hand how big a subculture can get, and the startling buying power of said subcultures, the point is to simply provide. One needn’t be the next iTunes or the next hot author to make a living. As Godin says in his post, “figure out how to be: patient, persistent and low cost.”
p.s. Chris Anderson has dedicated a blog to this subject and is busy making a book of it, as well.
by David Burn | Mar 18, 2005 | Politics
“An optimist isn’t necessarily a blithe, slightly sappy whistler in the dark of our time. To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something.
If we remember those times and places–and there are so many–where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.” –Howard Zinn
Howard Zinn grew up in a working-class family in Brooklyn where he became a shipyard laborer and later, in World War Two, an Air Force bombardier. After the war, he attended Columbia University under the GI Bill and earned his Ph.D in history. He has taught at Spelman College in Atlanta and later at Boston University. He has also been a history fellow at Harvard University and a visiting professor at the University of Paris and the University of Bolgna. Professor Zinn has won numerous awards and honors including The Thomas Merton Award, The Eugene V. Debs Award, The Upton Sinclair Award and The Lannan Literary Award. In a career that has spanned over forty years, Howard Zinn, as a professor, radical historian, progressive political theorist, social activist, playwright and author, has brought a fresh, thoughtful, humane and common-sensical approach to the study and teaching of history. Among his twenty books and plays are La Guardia in Congress, Disobedience and Democracy, The Politics of History, The Pentagon Papers: Critical Essays, Declarations of Independence: Cross Examining American Ideology, You Can’t Be Neutral On A Moving Train (his autobiography), The Zinn Reader, Marx in Soho and the seminal, highly celebrated A People’s History of the United States: 1492 to the Present.
For more on Howard Zinn, see this Robert Birnbaum interview.
by David Burn | Mar 17, 2005 | Politics
from The Guardian: In his annual letter to investors in Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett painted a bleak picture of a future US in which ownership and wealth had continued to move overseas, leaving the economy in thrall to foreign interests and faced with financial turmoil and political unrest.
Mr. Buffett said in the last 10 years foreign powers and their citizens had accrued about $3 trillion worth of US debt and assets such as equities and real estate. At current rates, he predicted that in another 10 years’ time the net ownership of the US by outsiders would amount to $11 trillion.
“This annual royalty paid [to] the world would undoubtedly produce significant political unrest in the US. Americans … would chafe at the idea of perpetually paying tribute to their creditors and owners abroad. A country that is now aspiring to an ‘ownership society’ will not find happiness in – and I’ll use hyperbole here for emphasis – a ‘sharecropper’s society’.”
by David Burn | Mar 15, 2005 | Politics
One of the great political stories in generations is about to unfold, as Richard ‘Kinky’ Friedman, humorist, performer, mystery writer, animal activist, habitual cigar smoker and Texas Monthly columnist, has announced his run for the governorship of the state of Texas in 2006.
Friedman views the success of Jesse Ventura in Minnesota and Arnold Schwarzenegger in California as a sign he can prevail similarly in Texas.
After graduation from University of Texas, Friedman joined the Peace Corps and spent two years in Borneo. He had some modest success on the entertainment circuit with his band, The Texas Jewboys, attracting the attention of Rolling Stone Magazine in 1972 and eventually touring with the famous all-star Bob Dylan Rolling Thunder Revue in the mid 1970s.
A decade later, he traded music for a typewriter and wrote the first of 17 mystery novels. His readers include President Bush and former President Clinton and both had him as an overnight guest at the White House.
If elected, Friedman plans to appoint his friend, Willie Nelson, as Energy Czar and work with him to make bio-diesel a viable reality. He also plans to improve education, abolish politcal correctness and “beat back the wussification of Texas if we have to do it one wuss at a time.”
